TPC Signature: Issue 6

GOLF'S LOUDEST HOLE

# 6 — w i n t e r 2015

$20 where sold

THRILL OF SPEED BECOMING A TPC

WATC H T H E F I L M YO U T U B E .C O M /J O H N N I E WA L K E R PLE ASE DR I N K R ESP ON S I B LY. J OHN N I E WA L K E R , B LUE L A B E L and the K EEP WA L K ING words, the Striding Figure device and associated logos are trade marks. Š John Walker & Sons 2015. Imported by Diageo, Norwalk, CT.

THE

GENTLEMAN’S

WAGER II J U D E L AW . Z H AO W E I . G I A N C A R L O G I A N N I N I D I R E C T E D BY JA K E S C OT T

a

Reade Tilley

publication

Matthew Squire

e d i to r

publisher

Robin Barwick

Matthew Halnan

c o n t r i b u t i n g e d i to r

a r t d i r e c to r

group art director

special thanks & contributors

enquiry addresses

Clive Agran Lisa Albert Samantha Arth David Beattie Zak Brown Ross Buckendahl Rich Claussen Tony Dear Pete Dye Ray Easler & his great team at Bay Hill John Hugghins Mike Farese EJ Flammer Betsy Hunewill Richard Johnson Chris Johnston Robert Trent Jones Jr. Jim Justice Chris Koch Kathy McKillip Colin Montgomerie Dan Nichols Matthew Range Ginny Sanderlin Joey Sprayberry Rick Stanoff Paul Stuart Victoria Student Sam Torrance Paul Trow Kristen Wagner Michelle Wait Brad Williams

 ms@tmcusallc.com

Leon Harris junior designer

Kieron Deen Halnan founding contributor

Arnold Palmer special contributors

Cori Britt, Doc Giffin contributing photographers

Patrick Drickey & Dan Murphy / stonehousegolf.com, Getty Images, Howdy Giles, Meghan Tilley, USGA, Brian F. Henry, Leon Harris vp , operations

Joe Velotta head of advertising sales

Jon Edwards advertising sales

Deric Piper Dean Jacobson Patrick Cadore executive advisor

Carla Richards finance administrator

Philip Callis

© 2015 TMC USA llc Reproduction without permission is prohibited. The articles appearing within this publication reflect the opinion of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publisher. The contents of advertisements and advertorials are entirely the responsibilty of advertisers.

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SAVINGS ON

HR ADMINISTRATION

LOWER TURNOVER RATE

2X

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Source: NAPEO publications: Professional Employer Organizations: Fueling Small Business Growth, September 2013, and Professional Employer Organizations: Keeping Turnover Low and Survival High, September 2014, by Laurie Bassi and Dan McMurrer

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tpc foreword

Great Season

F

eaturing an exciting stretch of golf that started in Napa Valley and capped off just outside of Atlanta, the 2014-2015 PGA TOUR season came to a close this past month, culminating in the FedExCup Playoffs which brought with it plenty of drama and remarkable golf. In the end, this season proved what we all had thought was true a year prior: there is a new generation of young golfers and they have taken professional golf by storm.

Leading that pack, 22-year old Jordan Spieth claimed five PGA TOUR wins, including the first two majors of the year, on his way to becoming the top-ranked player in the world and the youngest winner of the FedExCup. And at his heels, Australian Jason Day showcased an incredible second-half run to secure his first major at the PGA Championship and finish second in the FedExCup right behind Spieth, with both players at one time claiming the top spot in the Official World Golf Rankings in 2015.

And let’s not forget about Rickie Fowler who showed why he is one of golf’s best after winning THE PLAYERS Championship in May and securing a victory at the Deutsche Bank Championship just four months later. And while his season ended earlier than he’d have liked due to injury, one cannot overlook Rory McIlroy’s success in winning the World Golf Championships-Cadillac Match Play and the Wells Fargo Championship.

As their victories mounted, the youth movement on TOUR became one of the most compelling storylines of the season. In fact, at season’s end, four out of the top five ranked players in the world were under the age of 30, with Bubba Watson at age 36 rounding out the top five.

Within the TPC Network, we were very fortunate to have hosted several of these gifted young men at our courses, and they were nothing short of extraordinary.

A huge congratulations to the following players who won PGA TOUR events at one of our acclaimed TPC properties during the 2014-2015 season: Rickie Fowler, TPC Sawgrass and TPC Boston; Jordan Spieth, TPC Deere Run; Danny Lee, The Old White TPC; Bubba Watson, TPC River Highlands; Fabián Gómez, TPC Southwind; Steven Bowditch, TPC Four Seasons; Rory McIlroy, TPC Harding Park; Justin Rose, TPC Louisiana; Jimmy Walker, TPC San Antonio; Brooks Koepka, TPC Scottsdale; and Ben Martin, TPC Summerlin.

We always say that playing a TPC course allows you to walk the same fairways as your favorite PGA TOUR professionals, and as you can see from our list of winners this past season, this is quite the star-studded group. As we begin a new season and make plans for 2016, we invite you to experience the very destinations where history has been made. Whether by attending one of the 21 professional golf events we host or by enjoying a PGA TOUR-approved round of golf at one of our 34 properties, 2016 is certain to bring with it more good golf, and we look forward to having you be a part of it.

Timothy W. Finchem Commissioner PGA TOUR

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editor’s

letter

Not my car, but one just like it

First Cars

M

y first car wasn’t exactly a supercar, but it meant the world to me. Just as a bicycle had so many years before, my used 1984 Chevy Cavalier hatchback provided a means of escape, the last piece of kit I needed on my way to complete freedom and adulthood. Painted in what GM called “Light Briar Brown” it had almost no sex appeal whatsoever, and the headliner, which billowed down like the ceiling in a Silk Road-themed restaurant, hardly impressed. Still, the memories that car provided are some of my fondest, and I wouldn’t trade those for anything. Cars have always been important to the men in my family, as they are to so many others. And first cars, specifically, occupy special places in many hearts.

How fun it is, then, to consider what numerous PGA TOUR pros were driving before the big checks started rolling in. Arnie himself bought his own first car, a late 1940s or early 1950s Ford that eventually gave way to Cadillacs and airplanes. Similarly, Ian Poulter and many others didn’t start off in Ferraris or BMWs. Revisit their early rides on p34. One man who carried his love of cars from childhood through to his career is motorsports marketing leader Zak Brown, who discussed Formula One and more with us on p94. Auto enthusiasts of all ages will appreciate David Beattie’s incredible slot car tracks (p78), while those in search of an adrenaline-charged vacation can drive an F1 car, a NASCAR racer or even a dragster on p88.

There are a lot of cars in this issue, and a few airplanes as

well (p72) as we channel one of the all-time great surf films and chase summer around the globe, trying to extend our golfing season forever (p52).

I’ve upgraded my ride since that early Chevy, and it’s tough to complain about a more comfortable interior— and one that’s not falling down around your ears—reliable electronics, great handling and all the rest, but I do find myself thinking back occasionally to the days of beach towels over the seats, surfing stickers over the rust and an air conditioner that only wanted to work in winter.

I washed that car every week, vacuumed it, waxed it, changed the oil religiously and, I’m sorry to admit, spent more time taking care of it than I do my cars today. More than a simple machine it was a friend, game for any adventure, ready to go at a moment’s notice. It carried me on my first date, saw my friends and I through numerous road trips and provided a place to be alone when I needed some space. For all of that and more, this issue is dedicated to the first car—to mine and to everyone else’s. Keep your motors running, gentlemen.

Reade Tilley

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publisher’s foreword

Festive greetings

W

ith Christmas soon upon us, thoughts of family and children are at the forefront of everyone’s thinking. Looking ahead to 2016 also brings the future of our game to mind, and I believe wholeheartedly that every one of us should strive to figure out how women and children can be more involved in the sport we all love.

The 1950s’ model of a husband spending the weekend at the club while his wife and kids stay at home is long gone and, to put it simply, the more women play golf, the more men will play, too. Golfing with children as a family is not only rewarding and heartwarming but it also has an extensive variety of social and life skills benefits. This is why I am particularly proud that at TMC USA we have recently launched a sister publication, Women’s Golf Journal.

Although promising from a business monopoly perspective, it amazes me that Women’s Golf Journal is America’s only national women’s golf magazine.

I certainly urge any TPC Signature reader who wants to encourage a female friend or partner into playing golf to pick up a copy of the new magazine as an integral part of that persuasion and endorsement process.

That is not to suggest we are losing focus on TPC Signature! Far from it: our reader numbers continue to grow, to the extent that I am delighted to tell you we are shifting to a quarterly publication in 2016, up from three times a year. Not only is our magazine prospering, but the PGA TOUR as a whole is buoyant and full of optimism. We have the 20-something generation led by Spieth, Day, Fowler and McIlroy thrilling galleries and there is a host of talented amateurs on the verge of entering the fray. I am convinced we are entering a new golden age at the top of the world game.

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In support of this budding youth, enormous credit must be given to Arnold Palmer for his founding and continuous support of the Arnold Palmer Cup. The international collegiate team event is a pinnacle at which college golfers can aim and it also provides invaluable, early match play experience for future Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup golfers.

The event is growing and I hope it will soon be regarded on the same level as the biggest college football bowl games.

Emphasizing the far-reaching influence of the TPC network in world golf, on page 106 of this issue you can read about what it takes to build a major tournament venue in the 21st century. Inevitably the feature takes us back to TPC Sawgrass in Florida, where the TPC vision first became a reality. Pete Dye re-wrote the rule book on course design with his TPC Sawgrass masterpiece, showing the whole golf industry what could be achieved with a bold vision and a lot of endeavour—all propped up by a sound support structure.

Talking of breaking boundaries, don’t miss our feature on TPC Scottsdale in this issue either. You might find it hard to imagine the tranquility golfers enjoy there for 11 months of the year.

Which just leaves me to say that wherever you play, happy golfing for the remainder of the year and best wishes for 2016.

Matthew Squire

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Issue 6 Winter 2015

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34

Beyond the noise

Top Network

First rides

For most of the year, TPC Scottsdale is “just” an exquisite golf club—and much quieter than it is in February

It’s not easy to join the TPC Network, one of golf’s most exclusive clubs; here’s what it takes

The world’s finest golfers tend to drive in comfort and with class, but most rose from less salubrious origins

46 52 60 72 78 86 88 94 102 106 115

Monty’s Return Colin Montgomerie is enjoying newfound kinship in America Endless Summer In pursuit of the perfect, eternal golfing season No.15s The next chapter in our series of fantasy courses reaches the home stretch Plane Game Beating the traffic to some of the best tee times in golf Big Fun Miniature racing on a grand scale and high definition Thrill Seekers The quest for higher speeds has fascinated human kind for centuries Quick Trips Turning dreams into reality for adrenaline junkies Steady Fast Zak Brown, motorsports power broker, on his life in cars Perfect Glide Stemme motor gliders offer the best of both worlds Major ambitions Tony Dear considers how to build a golf course fit for majors TPC Signature Golf Holes Epic examples of TPC golf

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Issue 6 Winter 2015

132

136

152

Pure Sound

Revival of the Fittest

Cap Career

Bowers & Wilkins’ latest 800 Series Diamond loudspeakers deliver the music, and it’s beautiful

One of the rarest cars in the world, we trace the Delahaye 135s to a time when it was the fastest car in Britain

When New Era landed the Cleveland Indians contract in 1934 it triggered an American revolution in headwear

123 142 148 156 160 164 172 178 180 186

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Gift Guide Some creative thinking for the discerning holiday shopper Barrels Rolling, laughing, shooting and scraping, barrels have a lot to offer Public Service The traditional golf pub has become an endangered species Technological Alternative Clive Agran attempts to stem the tide of technology Pie A slice of pie lights up eyes, and baking one does not have to be blindingly difficult Field of Champions Paul Trow looks back to the roots of the Champions Tour Highway Ambitions Accessories for the distinguished road warrior Health Making sure your game and your body are in sync with each other Singing in the rain We visit London Golf Club for some advice on playing in the rain Last page 40 years ago, next May, Arnold Palmer flew around the world in two days

winter 2015

Its tournament draws more fans than any other event on the PGA TOUR. Its 16th hole is one of the most iconic holes in the game. And the exciting records set here include the only hole-in-one on a par-4 in PGA TOUR history. But when the tournament is done, and when the crowds are gone, TPC Scottsdale goes back to being a golf club—a very good one, in fact. And certainly much quieter than it is in February

Beyond the Noise Arizona State alum Phil Mickelson plays a shot on the 16th hole during the first round of the 2015 Waste Management Phoenix Open

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T

here’s a story told that goes something like this: an Arizona State University student asks her dad for $50. “Why do you want $50?,” he asks. “So I can go to the Waste Management Phoenix Open at TPC Scottsdale,” she says. The dad says OK, and gives her the money. The next day the father asks, “So who did you see?” “What do you mean?” she replies. “Well, did you see Phil Mickelson or Sergio Garcia or Rickie Fowler or…?”

She blinks for a second, then laughs and says, “Oh dad! I didn’t go for the golf!”

The club that hosts “The Greatest Show on Grass,” as the Phoenix Open is called, counted roughly 190,000 people on Saturday in 2014 and more than 563,000 for the week, setting both single-day and tournament-week attendance records. Incredibly popular among college students from nearby Arizona State University (which counts Phil Mickelson among its alumni), the tournament is the biggest party in golf, with concerts by leading artists, all kinds of food and drink on offer and, of course, great displays of golf for those who are watching. But it’s not as if TPC Scottsdale closes down after the tournament. Most of the year, it serves as one of the

Francesco Molinari’s ace in 2015 yielded fan mayhem at No.16; volunteers rushed to clean up the celebration

top public golf resorts in the country. Now, one year from a massive renovation that saw drastic improvements to both the clubhouse and the Stadium Course, the 36 holes on offer at TPC Scottsdale are more inviting than ever—not that the club has ever lacked for fans.

“You’ll hear some questions: ‘Are there really that many people?,’” says TPC Scottsdale General Manager Brad Williams, talking about Saturdays at the tournament, when the college crowd shows up in force. “I tell people that it’s pretty darn close. And even if you’re off by 10 percent, that’s still 170,000.”

Most of the action is at the Stadium Course’s 16th hole, also known as “The Loudest Hole in Golf.” If Caesar had placed a 162-yard par-3 hole on the floor of the Roman Colosseum, it would hardly have looked different. Players come off the 15th green and walk through a tunnel before emerging into an arena filled with 30,000 roaring fans, filling the grandstands that frame the TOUR’s only fully encircled hole. Good shots are loudly cheered, bad shots are loudly booed and occasional bursts of brilliance—like holesin-one by Tiger Woods (1997), Jarrod Lyle (2011), and Francesco Molinari (2015)—result in complete mayhem.

“It’s a mess to clean up,” admits Williams. “But the only real downside of it, when those bleachers are up, is that it creates some issues for us with shade. The right-hand side of the tee box and right behind the green, it’s tough to

Guests think it’s great to pull up through the tunnel off the 15th green and arrive in the “stadium” grow grass for us. It takes four months to build [the seating] and two months to take it down, so for six months a year that hole has some construction going on—it’s not quiet.

We can’t stop working when a group comes through, and you would think that some guests might not like that, but I think most love it.”

The shade issue, along with permitting issues and other variables, prevents the club from simply leaving the seating in place year round, but whether it’s up or down the attention generated by the hole is “all positive” during the year, Williams says.

“Guests think it’s really great, actually, to pull up through the tunnel off the 15th green, and arrive in the stadium, for lack of a better word. They just stop and look.

This is the only place in golf where you can drive in and get this kind of experience. It’s pretty darn cool.”

Much like TPC Sawgrass with its iconic No.17 island green, Williams says that some people can seem to forget that there are 17 other holes on TPC Scottsdale’s Stadium Course.

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TPC Scottsdale Stadium Hole 2

The improvements are great, and the back 9 is now a really fun and dynamic way to finish “It’s funny,” he says. “It’s one of the most recognizable holes in golf when the bleachers and skyboxes are up, but when they’re not up it’s just like any other hole. The 10th green and 16th green are kind of back-to-back, and the original routing had that as a double green, oddly enough— which would have been interesting—and so the 11th tee ends up being adjacent to the 16th green, and people will be like, ‘Wait, is that…?’ They have no idea.

“We’ll also have guests come in, and it’s similar to No.17 at Sawgrass, where they’re not playing golf, they just want to go out and see 16—but it’s just an ordinary hole in summer. When you play the hole and the stands are down it doesn’t look anything like you see on TV. “Of course, even in summer when there are no stands up, we’ll still see our golfing guests booing each other if they miss the green—that’s what you do there!”

Just past 16, No.17 gets its share of attention as well. Williams says The Thunderbirds, the local group that has organized the Phoenix tournament since the event’s inception in 1939, is building a new 20,000-square-foot hospitality space on the left-hand side of 17 that will be just 20 yards off the green—“which is pretty darn close,” as Williams has it. This is the 332-yard par-4 famously aced by Andrew McGee in 2001, the only hole-in-one on a par-4 in TOUR history, and “it’s a great place to watch golf,” says Williams. “A very exciting hole.”

For visitors who come to TPC Scottsdale’s Stadium Course when the tournament isn’t on, “I think you’re going to experience a really well-designed and playable golf course with a little bit of a desert feel,” he says. “It’s easy to

maintain playability. You’re always going to be able to find your ball and be able to hit it again. Maybe you’re not in a great lie, but it won’t be rocks and really nasty native desert, and so it’s really well-conditioned and it’s a great golf course for players of all levels in that regard. You’re going to have the opportunity to hit every club in the bag at some point and have a really good time.”

Recent improvements to the course have certainly enhanced the experience, with one of the most significant changes coming on the 450-yard, par-4 14th hole.

“It was a pretty mundane or pedestrian par-4, 440-450 yards, straight. There was nothing to it really. We made a change on that hole late in the renovation to move the green back 30 or 40 yards. We put it up on top of a hill, a little more left, and changed it into one of the most visually attractive holes on the golf course—and also one of the hardest holes on the golf course. It plays 495 yards uphill and the green sits diagonally with bunkers at the front. It was always the weak link on the back nine, but now I think it’s a really fun stretch of finishing holes to play. No.11 is a demanding par-4, 480 yards. No.12 is kind of a peninsula green par-3, with water in play on the right-hand side.

No.13 is reachable with water right. No.14 is the changed hole, and so on until No.18, which is a very good par-4 with water on the left-hand side. The back nine has turned into a fun and dynamic way to finish. It’s great to watch on TV, and for our guests that play it’s really fun and enjoyable. If you’re playing a match with buddies, all sorts of things can happen on the last five holes. It’s really, really positive.”

The actual changes to the course proper were led by original architect Tom Weiskopf and included the relocation of four greens, resurfacing of all greens, reshaping and re-grassing of all tee complexes, relocation and reshaping of all bunker complexes, replacement of cart paths and re-landscaping of desert areas. TPC Scottsdale has been

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25

irrigating and handling some operations with reclaimed with about 2,000 square feet which is also used for water for a long time, anyway, so they were ahead of the tournament player dining… We created a lot more space curve on that one. The other changes, while significant, were for [the players] and their families to be comfortable when also successful, Williams says. they’re here. Before, there couldn’t have been more than 800 “The golf course turned out really well. In testament square feet, and we tried to jam them and their families in to how well it turned out, we’re making no changes this there for dining, plus a little patio. The improvements were year. That’s fairly uncommon: when you make changes and very well received. tweak a tournament golf course, to not have to go back “We also use the space for receptions and meetings. We and do that the following year. That’s something we’re very never had it before, never had a place for a group of over 24 happy with.” players, nowhere private for them to go and do any function While the recently renovated Stadium Course is before or after golf.” getting all the attention, there’s another course at TPC Visitors to TPC Scottsdale might notice that the Scottsdale: the Champions Course. Designed by Randy sustenance options on offer are slightly different than Heckenkemper and built on the site of the former Desert what they might be used to as well, and that’s because the Course, Champions received its own renovation in 2007 excellent Fairmont Scottsdale operates the club’s food-andand is very popular as well, with a pleasant mix of rugged/ beverage services. In a definite departure for a standard golf elegant character and a price point that’s roughly half of its property, the on-site restaurant is a full-on themed dining more famous sibling. experience called Toro, which was part of the renovation.

“One of the things that we like here is that the two “Honestly, it’s a little different for a golf clubhouse,” golf courses on property are really quality golf courses. says Williams. “It’s a Latin restaurant and rum bar, and The Champions Course doesn’t get the recognition of the there’s a Latin concept and a little flair to it. It’s very Stadium Course, but we like that they are both high quality different for a golf crowd but so far it’s been really well at two really different price points. We’re not trying to fill received. It’s opened with really good response and reviews, up two golf courses at the same rate. and it’s definitely a step up and improvement.”

“In summer we swing back to a pretty significant local Beyond that, “it all looks a lot more modern, better crowd, especially on the Champions Course. But over the year than before,” says Williams. “This year at tournament, the I would guess maybe 85 to 90 percent of players are from out first year in the renovated clubhouse went better than we of town. We’ll see 45,000 rounds on each golf course—it’s a ever could have expected. The feedback from players during busy place, and we’re only open 10 months a year.” the Waste Management Phoenix Open was fantastic on Williams explains that TPC Scottsdale is closed for both counts, both the clubhouse and the course. It all turned maintenance in July, that 11 days go to the tournament, out really well.” and 17 for over-seeding, making it “a TPC Scottsdale’s new clubhouse and beautiful setting busy and active place year-round,” as he puts it.

With all of the impactful changes to the Stadium Course and with all of the basic maintenance going on, the clubhouse has not been ignored.

In fact, the transformation there has been sincerely dramatic. Working with architecture firm Allen & Philip, TPC Scottsdale (which is owned by the city of Scottsdale) added locker room space and meeting areas and truly fixed up the overall property, yielding an altogether different visitor experience.

“The clubhouse we had before had gotten really dated,” says Williams.

“We refreshed it aesthetically, and added a new locker room with 156 lockers, which has been really well received, added a new meeting space

26

winter 2015

No Time for Innovation and Strategy?

9%

50% LOWER FAILURE RATE

21%

HIGHER GROWTH RATE

24-33%

SAVINGS ON

HR ADMINISTRATION

LOWER TURNOVER RATE

2X

more participation in retirement plans

Source: NAPEO publications: Professional Employer Organizations: Fueling Small Business Growth, September 2013, and Professional Employer Organizations: Keeping Turnover Low and Survival High, September 2014, by Laurie Bassi and Dan McMurrer

The numbers don’t lie. Tapping into Insperity’s depth, breadth and level of care can give you back the time you need to be innovative.

Now, how can we help you run better, grow faster and make more money? insperity.com/PEO-inc | 800-465-3800

HR and Business Performance Solutions: Workforce Optimization® Services | Human Capital Solutions Payroll Services | Time and Attendance | Performance Management | Organizational Planning Recruiting Services | Employment Screening | Financial Solutions | Expense Management Retirement Services | Insurance Services

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WINTER 2015/16

ISSUE

Can Golf Start a Revolution?

Paradise Found

Playing Hawaii HOW TO PARTY MALIBU-STYLE WHY YOU SHOULDN’T KEEP SCORE

#1

CARA SANTANA Catch her if you can

YOGA FOR GOLF 001 WGJ Cover.indd 1

27/10/2015 01:43

TOP

NETWORK There are golf clubs that one can approach for membership, and then there are golf clubs that do the approaching themselves. If you’re a golf course property, one of the greatest honors, certainly, is to hear the phone ring, to answer it, and to have the voice on the other end of the line say, “This is the PGA TOUR’s TPC Network and we’d like to talk.” Senior Vice President TPC Operations John Hugghins tells us what it takes to get that call

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TPC Sawgrass (above); Pete Dye (right)

The entire premise of the TPC Network, Hugghins says, was for the TOUR to be more visible and for our players to to ensure that the PGA TOUR and the Tours it supports had make a better living, and so we had the opportunity to do enough quality courses on which to stage their tournaments. that through our TPCs. When you look at the TPC Network “In the mid-1980s the growth of golf courses truly as a whole, you’ll see players’ names associated with many accelerated,” he says. “TPC Sawgrass opened in 1980 and of our clubs, and that model is still active today.” the second TPC opened in 1984. At about that time, there However, the golf industry certainly has not sustained was a lot of real estate development activity in the United the same growth that we saw in the 1980s. Specifically, States and we were ‘under-golfed’ at that point, we simply after the economic downturn in 2008, golf development did not have enough golf courses.” drastically slowed. Suddenly there were more courses than For a growing TOUR, that meant a shortage of courses there were burgeoning events, and so the TPC focus had to to support an ever-increasing number of events. It wasn’t change somewhat. long before developers rushed to meet demand, and when “As an industry, many more golf courses have closed they needed planning expertise to qualify their property as now in the last five or six years than have opened, and no a tournament venue, the TPC Network was ready. developer is dedicating 180 acres for a golf course anymore.

“At that time, almost all of our opportunities were Simply put, the supply and demand equation is still out of presented to us by real estate developers who wanted a balance. So our focus the last several years has been to take golf course in a city where there was a tour event. Simply the great clubs that we have and to keep them capitalized put, the tour event itself either needed a golf course because and in great condition. This may seem simple, but it is a one was not present or the event needed to move to a new problem for a lot of the industry: other courses are able golf course because in the current location it could not to keep their property open and going, but are they able accommodate the fans,” Hugghins explains. “Situations like to keep it fresh? We feel like we’ve done a really good job this were where the TPC product fit so well: we had this keeping our brand in the place that it should be by taking stadium spectator golf concept that started here [at TPC advantage of competitive benefits that we have as part of Sawgrass] and we began to sort of carry that out through the PGA TOUR. We are able to host the best players in the our other properties.” world at our properties, and showcase our golf courses as Legendary architect Pete Dye and then-PGA TOUR the premier products in each of our markets.

Commissioner Deane Beman had devised the stadium While the original model featuring real estate concept, in which golf courses were built to serve fans as developments and new course construction may not come much as they were pros, with top-level golf being buoyed around again for a while, there are other opportunities, and by raised spectator areas and plenty of room for hospitality. the TPC Network is leading the way in terms of developing The TPC concept quickly spread, and the TPC them. The brand has associated itself with top-quality Network emerged to deliver top-level golf to fans and existing properties, like The Greenbrier, and of course players across the country. there’s the international variable.

“After the success of TPC Sawgrass, we were ultimately “Ninety percent of our growth looking for markets that could support high-end brands such opportunities right now are outside as the PGA TOUR and TPC. So that meant finding locations the United States,” says Hugghins. where we felt we would be able to provide two things: an “We’re four or five years into unmatched tournament venue for our professionals, as well international expansion now as a memorable golf experience for players of every ability and we’re excited about our level. In the end, we were very fortunate to find and work opportunities. However, we’ve with great partners and developers. In almost every case in also learned that doing business the formative years of the Network, which really took us outside the United States is not through the early 1990s, we brought a tournament to each the same as doing business inside of our properties. the United States. There are, of “Also, PGA TOUR players were just becoming course, language barriers architects at that point, so once that trend started, what we and cultural differences, would do is be very mindful of making recommendations to but we’re also working developers [regarding current and past players as potential hard to ensure that architects]. As part of the TOUR, we were blessed to have our international strong relationships in place with many professionals, so we partners understand ended up working on golf courses with countless players, more nuanced including Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Gary Player. issues, including Our job at the PGA TOUR is to create a better platform product standards.

Certain markets have simply not had extensive experience in providing a high-end golf product. For instance, in China there is something like 600 golf courses there and 1.3 billion people. Conversely, the US has 300 million people and thousands and thousands of golf courses. So at the moment, they may not be as well versed in how to operate golf courses to current golf course maintenance standards, or utilize best practices as to how to sell memberships, and so on. In some ways you’re almost helping to create the market. There have been a few countries that want to get golf culturally in their countries, but they’re just not quite there yet.

“That said, I don’t think the activity outside of the US will slow down. It’s almost as if these international markets are where we were 35 years ago: there are still a lot of development opportunities, so we’re likely to see more and more golf course communities in these countries in the coming years.

“One of the other things that common sense would tell you to expect is the continued increase in the number of international players that we have now on the PGA TOUR. More and more these amazing, talented players are on television and each week they’re reaching 250 countries around the world. Golf is going to become more and more popular throughout the world because of these emerging international stars. When you have four or five world class players on the PGA TOUR who are from emerging markets, the interest in golf from those countries is certainly going to be a lot greater than it is today. So the international growth of the TOUR is also going to be a key driver of opportunities for us.

“Still, we don’t want to grow just for the sake of growing. We still want to only be affiliated with properties that can host TOUR events and the best players in the world. If we aren’t able to have an event at a TPC property, we want the club to be capable of hosting an event if we could move something there. It has to be capable of hosting a Tour event: Champions Tour, Web.com Tour, PGA TOUR and now the Mackenzie Tour – PGA TOUR Canada, PGA TOUR Latinoamerica, PGA TOUR China… In the past few years, the PGA TOUR has continued to expand to include these new tours and reach new markets, so we’re trying to help those tours grow, too. If we can find a club in a market where maybe the Web.com Tour wanted to go, then we want to try to help find a property and get the golf course right for the growth of that Tour, and that’s across all the Tours. We do a lot of searching.”

When the TPC Network identifies a suitable property in a market, a club it feels could join the Network, a call is placed (or in some cases, the property contacts the TPC first) and wheels are put in motion. A typical situation might go something like this, as Hugghins explains: “Somebody says to a developer, ‘Have you ever thought about making this a TPC?’ The developer says they hadn’t

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really thought about it. He wants to know more about us, so he’ll call us, and we do a presentation over the telephone and tell him what the requirements would be: you’ll have to host a tournament or be ready to host one soon, so we need to see the routing and development plan, and make sure the quality of housing is consistent with quality of the golf course. In some cases the whole job might have to be re-routed, so we’ll help them build a new land plan before we would consider getting involved. They might have to redo their master plan, so we have a design and construction company, a small shop but full of very talented people that have seen just about everything in terms of design and construction.

“We’ll all make a visit out there, look at their specifications, and make some changes. Maybe the clubhouse is in the wrong location, so we’ll help with clubhouse design. Once we’re done and it’s to a point where a Tour event could move there, even if we don’t get a TPC agreement, we’ve helped them do what they need to do to get an event and so we’ve helped that particular Tour as well.

The club doesn’t pay for our initial help because we know that there’s probably going to be an event there whether the club becomes a TPC or not, and so it’s worth the investment in our time. That’s the job.

“There wouldn’t be a TPC Network at all if it wasn’t for the desire to have improved tournament sites. Deane Beman started that here at TPC Sawgrass, and I don’t think he ever expected that there’d be a Network of TPCs like this. If you look at the 34 TPCs, we only operate 19. The others are licensed, and every year one of those has hosted a tournament at some point; there’s not a single TPC that hasn’t hosted an event.

“I’m biased, but we really feel like we have some great competitive advantages with being owned by the TOUR, hosting tournaments, and our expertise in operations, and we hope our members and customers appreciate that and feel that. Hopefully we’re representing the TOUR at the very highest level—as they should be represented. The TOUR’s brand is great and there’s no other like it. That’s our story.”

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First Cars It is simply a means of transport to some; to others it is a treasure to be cherished. And then there are those for whom their car is a symbol of status, success and wealth. One way or another the car an individual drives is often an extension of his or her personality, particularly for those who are in the fortunate position of driving the car of their choice.

While the tournament parking lots of today are filled with Ferraris, Corvettes and Cadillacs, let us not forget there was a time when some of these famous golfers could hardly scrape together the cash for a working auto of any description. Here Robin Barwick and staff take a look at motoring pros and their early rides

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Nick Faldo: Ford Capri Nick Faldo had to wait until he turned professional in 1976, at the age of 18, before he bought his first car. Members at his home club, Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, England, raised £1,000 to set him on is way, and after winning £60 on his professional debut in the French Open, and then a more significant £500 in the German Open, he could afford a second-hand Ford Capri 1600 GT. “Pretty flash, eh!” says Faldo. “I spent the rest of the summer chugging around the B-roads of Britain and Europe, desperately searching for some obscure golf course where the latest qualifying tournament was being held.”

Garage: Designed by one of the same guys responsible for the Mustang, the Capri was meant to be a Euro equivalent of the pony car, but the low-spec’s 62hp 1.6L engine built in Kent, England, didn’t match the Mustang’s performance. Other versions were better, but it eventually moved over to be sold under the Mercury badge.

Jack Nicklaus: Buick convertible Jack Nicklaus was a fresh-faced, 20-year-old amateur when he married Barbara, and the couple’s honeymoon was spent on a driving tour from Ohio to New York and Atlantic City, all in Nicklaus’ pride and joy, a 1959 Buick in white with a green soft-top. Barbara had always wanted to visit New York City, although she had to endure diversions to Hershey Country Club and Pine Valley on the trip.

Garage: Slightly longer than that year’s Cadillac at 225 inches and besting its senior GM sibling in power as well with a 401 cu in V8, the 1959 Buick was luxurious, wellpriced and a true statement by what was then an upstart marque.

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Annika Sorenstam: Ford Festiva In 1991 and at the age of 20, Sweden’s Annika Sorenstam was a student at the University of Arizona Tucson with limited English and limited funds. “I walked into a dealership and said I would like to buy a car,” she remembers. “They asked what my budget was and I literally had $3,000 in my hand, so they looked at me and took me out to a parking lot at the back where they had old, second-hand cars. I tried one car and smoke started coming out of the engine, and the dealership had to tow the car back. I told them I didn’t want that car, and they showed me this black, two-door Ford Festiva. It was so small I had to put down the back seats to fit my carry bag in the trunk, but it was my first car and I washed it, vacuumed it, polished and waxed it regularly.

That was my first big purchase.”

Ernie Els: Volkswagen Beetle

Garage: Designed by Mazda for Ford, the tiny Festiva had a 4cyl 58hp engine that managed 0-60 in 13 seconds. Proving not to be the party on wheels its festive moniker suggested, it was later re-branded more appropriately as the “Aspire”

Growing up in South Africa, Ernie Els’ first car was a second-hand 1969 Volkswagen Beetle. “If you can imagine Herbie from the movies, that was my car, except mine was light blue,” Els tells us. He didn’t drive his car down flights of steps like Herbie, although Els admits the car “did break down on me several times.”

Garage: The fuel cap release on the Beetle moved inside in 1969, but the big changes came the year before with improved shifting, ventilation and an innovative system that had the spare tire’s air pressure powering the windscreen-washer.

The washer shut down when the spare fell below 30psi.

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Arnold Palmer: coral pink, two-door Ford Arnold Palmer, aged 23, bought his first car on leaving the Coast Guard in 1953, a used two-door Ford in coral pink.

The car played a central role in two of the most significant years in the young golfer’s life. He and first wife Winnie eloped in the car, tying the knot in Alexandria, Virginia in 1954, and then the young couple set out on tour for Palmer’s rookie season in 1955. They even hitched a 19-foot trailer onto the back of it in an effort to reduce travelling expense, and when Palmer drove up Magnolia Lane for the first time to make his Masters debut in 1955, it was in this car. By the time the Palmers returned home to Latrobe midway through the 1955 season, the car had nearly collapsed.

“We took a short-cut through the mountains to get home, but that was a big mistake,” recalls Palmer. “The road was narrow and steep and as we approached the top of one hill the car’s radiator started to spew steam. Winnie and I literally had to push the car to the top of the hill, and then on the way down, the car’s brakes began smoking. The last five miles of that journey home were pretty tense.”

Two-wheel Rickie It has been said that Rickie Fowler had so much ability at motocross he could have pursued a career as a professional rider, had golf not gotten in the way. Growing up near Murrieta, California, Fowler was three years old when his bike-racing father Rod first got him into motorcross.

“He was always a little daredevil,” says Rod. “When we rode through the desert he was like my shadow.

Everything I did, he would follow.”

The Fowler family live in the rugged hills outside Murrieta, with plenty of rough terrain ideal for dirt bikes, and Fowler would borrow his father’s tractor to make ramps on his improvised biking tracks.

“I was never too paranoid about Rickie’s riding,” claims Fowler’s mother Lynn. “He was so well coordinated from the start. He was just a natural.”

“Motocross is what I grew up doing with my dad and my family, ever since the age of three,” says Fowler, who is ranked sixth in the world for his day job at the time of writing. “My dad liked racing bikes and he got me into it.

We used to go out to the desert to ride, and I am definitely an adrenaline junkie. Eventually I had to concentrate on golf and leave the bike in the garage, but it is what I love to do and I wish I could do it more.

“It is a fantastic feeling to get some hot laps in, and it is a great way to let loose and have some fun. What would

be really cool would be take an old golf course that is out of business and set-up a motocross track on it. That could be the ultimate track.”

At 15, Fowler was on his bike and approaching a makeshift ramp in a trailer park when a young child came running out towards the ramp. Fowler avoided contact with the child but the evasive action caused him to come off his bike, fracturing a wrist and breaking a foot in three places.

"At that point I knew if I wanted to be serious with golf and take it to the next level I wouldn't be able to share my time with riding," says Fowler.

Colin Montgomerie: Mazda GLC Aged 20 and studying at Houston Baptist University, Colin Montgomerie’s father agreed to buy him a car as long as the young man covered the insurance and running costs.

Montgomerie promptly bought an old Mazda GLC, and with $10 change he bought a “MONTY” license plate.

As a 20-year-old student the insurance cost was high and Montgomerie did not have a Green Card and so could not qualify for most part-time jobs. What he could do was valet park at the local Lochinvar Country Club, and from a big gala dinner on his first night he made $500 in tips.

Garage: Despite its lackluster appearance, early versions of the “Great Little Car” from Mazda arrived on U.S. shores with rear-wheel drive and the same chassis as the sportier RX7. Both of those attributes were lost in the mid 1980s, sadly, but the subsequent econo-box was later redeemed by transformation into the capable modern 323.

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Run watcha brung!

A few years back, if he wasn’t competing for $5 million purses on the PGA TOUR, Kenny Perry was hurtling from 0-150mph in four seconds in his dragster, which for a while was a modified 1998 Pontiac Grand-Am. A decade ago, he even won a racing trophy at Indiana’s Muncie Speedway.

“I couldn’t believe it when I actually won a race,” says Perry, now 55 and a force on the Champions Tour. “I ran in what they call an Outlaw series, which has all kinds of cars: turbos, nitrous, super chargers, it doesn't matter, you just ‘run what you brung and hope you brung enough!’ The thing is, I was terrible at it! But I would just go out there and enjoy it.

“That car pulled three Gs the moment you let the clutch out, so from sitting still you'd travel 60 feet in one second. The force throws you into the back of your seat and the car pulls you like an animal. It is really unbelievable how fast the car moves in the first 660 feet.

“My car made 1,400 horse power, and it ran a quarter of a mile in 7.3 seconds [what drag racers call ‘7:30s’]. It was a very fast car and to me, drag racing is pure excitement and pure exhilaration, and part of the appeal is that it is so different from golf. I got a real exhilaration rush the whole way.”

Perry isn’t the only racer on the Champions Tour. Jay Don Blake, 57, attended the National Hot Rod Association school in 1995, and the following year won a hot-rod sprint in Las Vegas in his souped-up 1957 Chevy Bel Air.

"I've always been interested in speed and anything that has a motor in it, and how to make it go fast," says Blake. "Golf is slow and racing is fast, but in golf, when you set up a shot, you have to calculate the yardage, wind, temperature, altitude, elevation—it can be real technical. In racing, you've got to do a lot of those same things in the staging area to make the car work. But once you leave the starting line, it's very different."

Bruce Lietzke, now 64, who won 20 titles on the PGA and Champions Tours combined, said his dream job was to be an engine builder on a racing team, not a golfer. He saw his first drag meet at the age of 14 in Wichita and never looked back.

“Cars are my passion,” says Lietzke, who used to race his 1968 Plymouth Roadrunner. “The garage is where I spend most of my time when I’m home.”

At the end of the 1985 season, Lietzke’s caddie Al Hanson asked him what he was going to do over the six-week off-season. “I’m going to put my clubs away and not touch them until I get back out here in January,” replied the 34-year-old, then in his golfing prime.

Hanson didn’t believe him, and so he shoved a banana up the headcover of Lietzke’s driver as he packed away his clubs. Six weeks later, at the start of the 1986 season, the banana was still there, and it was a stinking, mushed-up mess.

Bruce Lietzke

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Ian Poulter: Vauxhall Astra As an assistant pro at Leighton Buzzard Golf Club, north of London, Ian Poulter made his commute to work in a second-hand Vauxhall Astra. His boss at Leighton Buzzard was the head pro Lee Scarbrow, who tells Kingdom: “Ian was not a good timekeeper. There must have been a real shortage of cats in Leighton Buzzard judging by the number of times Ian apparently hit one with his car on the way to work. His other favorite excuse was that his car had a puncture on the way in. Sometimes he would stop the car outside the club and rub his hands on the wheels to make them dirty to look as if he had changed a tire, but he didn’t realize I could see him doing this from the window.”

Garage: Vauxhall’s entry into the “hot hatch” wars of the 1980s saw the Astra take on VW’s GTI and the Ford Escort, holding its own with an available 1.6L overhead-cam engine with aluminum heads and 90hp. Popular enough and with good handling, it never matched the sales of its rival Ford.

The Prancing Horse, saddled in tartan Ian Poulter is a professional golfer by trade, although it sometimes seems the Englishman gains more attention for his extensive collection of Ferraris than he does for his golf.

Mind you, Poulter has not won on TOUR since claiming the 2012 WGC HSBC Champions, so it is little wonder.

You know he’s not just any old Ferrari customer when the Italian manufacturer bestowed upon Poulter the honor of making him the first customer in the United States to receive a tailor-made Ferrari. And it wasn’t Ferrari’s Florida rep that presented Poulter his customized Ferrari FF three years ago, it was Ferrari CEO Amedeo Feliosa, at a party Ferrari threw for Poulter at Pebble Beach.

Poulter’s customization began with an exterior in a pale shade of “Sabbia” and optional forged alloy wheels, and continued with an interior in Black-Grey-Red, featuring Black Poltrona Frau leather with tartan trim on the seats and roof interior, which complements some of the designs in Poulter’s line of IJP golf apparel. Not only was this the first tailor-made Ferrari delivered in the United States, it was also the world’s first Ferrari to feature tartan.

The $300,000 car runs on a 6.3-litre V12 engine, which can deliver 0-62mph in 3.7 seconds and a top speed of 208 mph.

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Bernhard Langer: Ford Escort Bernhard Langer was an assistant pro at Munich Club when he won his first German Open title in 1975 at the age of 17.

The winner’s check was for 6,000 German Marks, which would have taken Langer two years to earn as an assistant, and he immediately bought a yellow Ford Escort. “I polished that car until my arms ached,” he tells us. In February 1976 Langer headed to Spain to join the European Tour, but because he couldn’t afford hotels he made the 1,600-mile drive in his Ford without any rest. “After 25 hours of solid driving I felt like I had been drugged by the time I pulled into Marbella.” He missed the cut in the Portuguese Open and then the Spanish Open, but in his third event, the Madrid Open, Langer finished fifth and never looked back.

Garage: The mid-70s Escort was jointly developed by Ford’s UK and German divisions and was one of the most popular cars in Europe. There were a number of trims available, with the 1.6L RS Mexico proving seriously sporty, but even the 1.1L base model featured solid handling and performance.

Ian Woosnam: Volkswagen Dormobile Ian Woosnam was 18 when he qualified for his rookie season on the European Tour in 1977. His father, a farmer, had already bought a Volkswagen Dormobile “caravanette” for the purpose of keeping costs down on golfing travels, and once Woosnam had his Tour card in hand the young golfer was gifted with the vehicle. The VW was Woosnam’s home on wheels for five full years as he strived to get established.

He drove it from tournament to tournament, cooking, eating and sleeping in it and showering in clubhouses as he went. If the weather turned cold he would sleep in his waterproofs. “These were tough times,” admits Woosnam. “I was struggling to make even a halfway cut, but the VW Dormobile grew to reflect my own identity and attitude. Yes, I was battling; yes, it was hard; but damn it, I was going to get there in the end.”

Garage: Like other firms at the time, UK company Dormobile turned camper vans into homes away from home. Successful until the 1970s when such conversions lost popularity, their VW had a side-hinge folding roof, as opposed to the “pop top” of the better-known Westphalia version. A sink, bed, storage and more were all included, but most versions puttered along with a 1.1L air-cooled 25hp engine.

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Greg Norman: Holden Torona SS The teenage Greg Norman made his money from gambling on the golf course—with success. Winnings funded Norman’s first car, an Australian-made Holden Torona SS. “It was a fastback model,” says Norman. “It was bright orange with stripes down the side, and it had a six-cylinder engine with a four-speed gearbox. It was a sporty looking rig.” Later, as an assistant pro, Norman drove a Ford Cortina until it had a nighttime collision with a kangaroo.

Garage: Named after an Aboriginal word meaning “to fly,” the Torona was a seriously fun car, well equipped and popular with club racers.

Ben Crenshaw: Oldsmobile Cutlass Coupe Ben Crenshaw shared a 1965 Oldsmobile Cutlass Coupe with his brother, and the car became the unofficial high school golf team vehicle—screeching into Austin golf courses in the mid-1970s. Once, by the time Crenshaw parked in a club lot, there was steam rising from beneath the hood. A helpful passer-by recognized the likely problem and warned Crenshaw not to turn off the ignition, but it was too late.

Crenshaw turned the key and “BOOM!”, the engine blew.

Garage: The top spec of this car came with a 365hp V8, but even the base V6 was solid. Also: 1965 was the first year for Oldsmobile’s “rocket” logo, which lasted until the 1990s.

Paul McGinley: Subaru …

Roundabout 1990, when 22-year-old Irishman Paul McGinley was at the U.S. International University in San Diego, he had a $1,000 for a car. “I had a friend who knew about cars and I took him to an auction,” McGinley says. “He found me a bright blue, two-door Subaru hatchback. I bought it for $1,000 and all I had to change were the brake pads. I put a right few thousand miles on that car and it stood me in good stead, driving to tournaments as far away as LA and Palm Springs. I drove it for a year and a half and then sold it for $1,000, so that friend made the right choice!”

Garage: In 1983 Subaru sold its 1 millionth car in the U.S. Known as solid performers, many Subarus included all-wheel drive, even on economy models, and while performance was all over the map, dependability was solid.

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Monty’s American Odyssey Colin Montgomerie is Scottish, yet many of the defining moments of his career have occurred in the United States, from failed attempts to win the U.S. Open to decisive success in Ryder Cup singles matches. Now Montgomerie is back as one of the leading golfers on the Champions Tour, and he speaks to Robin Barwick about his return to a hunting ground that has not always been happy

Colin Montgomerie (left) on his way to winning the 2014 U.S. Senior Open Championship at Oak Tree National

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S Sam Torrance, captain of Europe’s 2002 Ryder Cup team and a mainstay of the European Seniors Tour over the past decade, summarized Colin Montgomerie’s recent exploits in one line: “For a man who said he was never going to play seniors golf, Monty is not doing bad,” Torrance tells Kingdom.

It’s true. Montgomerie was not the first to say it and he won’t be the last, but he did claim he would not play seniors golf. Then, once he had gingerly dipped his toe, Monty found that he could not resist it and took a fullblooded dive off the springboard. “I have since learnt you should never say never,” said Montgomerie two years ago, as he prepared to make his Champions Tour debut.

“Monty” turned 50 on June 23, 2013, and made his seniors debut four days later. He didn’t win at first, but in 2014 Montgomerie did finally secure the first major title of his career at the Senior PGA Championship. No, it is not a fully-fledged, career-defining major title, like the ones that eluded and haunted Montgomerie in his prime, but still.

Off and running, he won the U.S. Senior Open, finished runner-up to Bernhard Langer at the Senior [British] Open and finished 2014 second behind his old Ryder Cup teammate in the Champions Tour’s Schwab Cup ranking.

The story of 2015 has been similar. Montgomerie successfully defended his Senior PGA title, wound up second in the Senior U.S. Open and then third in the Senior Open at Sunningdale in July, having led deep into the final round. He challenged Langer for the Charles Schwab Cup ranking again, too, falling just shy in the final event of the Champions Tour season, and so narrowly missing out on a million-dollar winner’s bonus. There is disappointment for Montgomerie in finishing runner-up to stubborn old Langer in the Charles Schwab Cup ranking two years in a row, but all in, he’s made a pretty good fist of it.

“I told him before he turned 50: ‘You wait and see, Monty. It’s in your blood.’ Judging by how competitive and how good he has been throughout his whole career, there was no way he was going to stop when 50 came around,” adds Torrance, 62. “You think, ‘Okay, I will play in a couple seniors events and see what happens,’ and then when you find you are competing it’s bloody awesome. It’s in his blood.”

“I thought I would be retired,” Montgomerie, now 52, tells Kingdom in an exclusive interview, before adding with that distinctive chuckle, “but I was causing my wife all sorts of headaches so she threw me out to play more golf.”

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Monty’s change of heart was triggered by his induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2013, which conveniently took place just before his 50th birthday. With Hall of Fame induction comes a Tour card for the Champions Tour, and the opportunity to play a 24-tournament schedule with total prize money of $49.35 million (in 2015). That is compared to a 2015 European Seniors Tour schedule of 10 tournaments and total prize fund of $5.6 million.

As a carrot the European prize fund is a little shriveled for a golfer, course designer and broadcaster of Montgomerie’s status, but in comparison the American fund is a seven-course banquet.

“I needed a purpose in life,” admits Montgomerie. “My golf course design business is going well, my charity is going well, but I needed more of a purpose to get me up and get me going. It doesn’t matter what you have done or how much bloody money you’ve got.

“To be inducted into the Hall of Fame was the catalyst and I thought, what the hell am I doing at home? Let’s give it a go and see what happens.

Above: Sam Torrance (left) with Colin Montgomerie at the 2002 Ryder Cup Right: Montgomerie winning the Senior PGA Championship Presented by KitchenAid

“I have enjoyed seniors golf more than I thought I would. The comradeship between the players is better than I expected. Everyone is happy for everyone else’s success, although everyone remains very competitive. The standard is extremely high and you have to play your best to win.”

The job of high-profile Tour golfer brings sponsorship opportunities, and Montomerie has always carefully managed associations with only a small number of blue-chip companies. Among the select few today is “workforce optimization” specialist Insperity.

“Insperity does a fantastic job helping small businesses manage their HR and employee benefits, so companies can concentrate on their core activities,” says Montgomerie.

“Insperity has helped my business and it is a privilege to be associated with them.”

Montgomerie also likes that Champions Tour galleries do not taunt him like crowds in the United States used to.

Back then, the shouts often featured the words “fat” and “bastard,” or the old favourite first coined in commentary by David Feherty, “Mrs. Doubtfire.” The Sunday of the 1999 Ryder Cup at Brookline saw wave after wave of insults and obscenities crashing around Montgomerie from an overexcited minority among the home crowd.

“In a funny sort of way, the verbal abuse was a back-handed compliment, although it didn’t seem like that at the time”

Montgomerie handled the verbal abuse with calm that day, taking punch after punch for the team without a flinch, and he won his point against Payne Stewart, but in individual tournaments the combustible Montgomerie would often sulk and occasionally lose his temper when baited, which only served to encourage the perpetrators. The same mentality is rife in schoolyards the world over.

Golf Digest magazine even issued 25,000 “Be nice to Monty” pins at the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage National Park in New York, in an attempt to quell the unsympathetic local sports fans. That just led to pin-wearers taking flak too.

“There has been no trouble at all on the Champions Tour,” assures Montgomerie. “It is a different atmosphere.

They have embraced me and I have embraced them so we are working together and it is brilliant. Now, to get clapped onto greens instead of what it was in the late 90s is superb, and it is a credit to the people out there. Once you are over 50 the whole thing changes, even playing in the majors, because I am not a threat any more in that world. When I was No.2 in the world I was a threat. I was the top-ranked European player and there were issues.”

A And in the Ryder Cup, Monty was a lethal threat. One of his greatest on-course achievements was never to lose a Ryder Cup singles point. In eight Ryder Cups as a player between 1991 and 2006, Montgomerie won six singles points outright and halved the remaining two. Mark Calcavecchia, Lee Janzen, Ben Crenshaw, Scott Hoch (twice), Stewart and David Toms (twice)—some of American golf’s grittiest scrappers among them—could not take a point off Monty.

“In a funny sort of way, the verbal abuse was a bit of a back-handed compliment, although it didn’t seem like that at the time,” he adds.

Looking ahead to the 2016 Ryder Cup, Montgomerie concurs with the claim European skipper Darren Clarke made at the PGA Championship, in ranking the European team as underdogs as the countdown to Hazeltine gathers pace.

“Europe as underdogs? Possibly,” he says. “You might think it is a bit odd to consider Europe as underdogs when

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What he did in eight Ryder Cup singles matches alone cut his niche at the Hall of Fame we have won six out of the last seven Ryder Cups, but on this occasion, possibly we are. The Americans are on a bit of a run right now and with them playing at home next year Darren is aware that it will be a difficult task, no question.”

The last Ryder Cup in the United States was in 2012, when Ian Poulter sparked an unlikely European revival. You might not need reminding that Europe were 10-4 down when Poulter birdied the last five holes of his Saturday afternoon fourball match, partnering Rory McIlroy against Jason Dufner and Zach Johnson, to snatch a point after the European pair had trailed from the first hole to the 14th.

The hosts led 10-6 going into the singles, McIlroy nearly missed his tee time after over-sleeping, but Jose Maria Olazabal’s team prevailed to complete the biggest comeback by an away team in Ryder Cup history, winning 14 ½-13 ½.

“I think there was a Seve influence coming down from above that week, to be honest,” reflects Montgomerie, in reference to the late Seve Ballesteros, “and Olazabal was playing that spiritual game. It was amazing what happened and it gives hope to any away team, that it is never over until one team has 14 ½ points.”

After the debacle of Tom Watson’s captaincy of the American team at Gleneagles last year—when the Ryder Cup was played on the doorstep of the Montgomerie family home in the village of Dunning—the PGA of America has given Love a shot at redemption. From the opening ceremony at Medinah three years ago, to the start of those Sunday morning singles, Love had the walk and the talk of a winning captain.

His captaincy seemed virtually flawless, and was highlighted by the inspired pairing of Phil Mickelson and Keegan Bradley, who were indomitable for three matches until

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Love made his first mistake: benching them for the Saturday fourballs.Montgomerie points to what he sees as a second error in Love’s judgment as well: “I think the American singles order was okay, but I would always have tended to put [Tiger] Woods higher up the order,” he says, recalling Love’s singles order that placed Woods in the final match against Francesco Molinari. “I always think that Woods can get a little bit lost further down the order. He is someone that loves the limelight, loves the show, and I would have stuck Woods out at number one to get his point on the board.

“I would have got Woods’ point in the bag early on, and that is what I would do with McIlroy today, and Stenson and Rose, our stars in Europe, and Kaymer. That is what I did with my team [in 2010]. I put Westwood out first, followed by McIlroy, then Donald to get those points early on. Since Sam Torrance did it back in 2002 that has been the way to do it: put your so-called strength at the top.”

And who did Torrance send out first in 2002?

Montgomerie, of course. He thrashed Hoch 5&4, Europe won the Ryder Cup back and Montgomerie’s rank as on-course general was sealed.

Until Montgomerie revived his playing career on the Champions Tour, he had failed to win a single PGA Tour title in the United States, let alone a major, so when he was voted into the World Golf Hall of Fame there were murmurs of dissent. Some of them louder than murmurs. It is true, Montgomerie should have won the U.S. Open at least once (well, twice) but what he achieved in the Ryder Cup, what he did in eight Ryder Cup singles matches alone, those eight rounds of golf over the course of 16 years cut his niche at the Hall of Fame.

Top Left: another Monty putt drops at the infamous 1999 Ryder Cup at Brookline Above: Captain Montgomerie surrounded by his winning team at Celtic Manor in 2010

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Endless Summer

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The Sandals’ iconic slow groove opens the film, surf guitars lazily following the beat as shots of waves, surfboards and beaches drench the movie screen in sunset gold. And then Bruce Brown’s friendly voice comes on: “Summer means many different things to different people,” he says. “To some it might mean the thrill of a high speed catamaran. Others like to float around and soak up a few stray rays. Still others like some kind of inland activity…”

W

e’ll stop him right there. The next words out of Brown’s mouth establish that The Endless Summer is a movie about surfing, but we’ll stick with “some kind of inland activity” and say that, for us, summer is all about golf. And just like surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August did in the film, our plan in this article is to follow the sun around the globe, playing round after round and meeting new friends as we spend the colder months chasing golf’s perfect season.

Perhaps we’ll do it for real one day and call Bruce’s son Dana to shoot the movie— “Endless Summer Fairways” has a nice ring to it. With titles like The Endless Summer, On Any Sunday and Dust to Glory in the family’s repertoire, we like the way the Browns think. But until our publisher decides to fund such a trip—and gives us the better part of a year off to take it—we’ll have to settle for flipping through the atlas and dreaming. Hang 18, shoot birdies and swing loose, dude. Here’s the plan:

CALIFORNIA In the movie, the surfers’ trip began here, at a break called Steamer Lane by Santa Cruz’s Lighthouse Point, and so we’ll start here too. Not far from where the surfers play, Alister MacKenzie’s elegant design at the semi-private Pasatiempo Golf Club curls over the hills. The esteemed designer called the club home in America, and his house still borders the sixth fairway. Bobby Jones loved the course, as do Tiger Woods and Juli Inkster (the club’s LPGA touring pro, who was born nearby) and numerous others who know a thing or two about the game. With loads of history made here since it opened in 1929, Pasatiempo is a fitting start to our endless summer tour.

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FLORIDA Florida’s nearly year-round sunshine has attracted generations of northerners looking to escape the colder winters in their hometowns, and those “snowbirds” as they’re called include a certain Mr. Palmer, who winters at his Bay Hill Club & Lodge in Orlando every year. Bay Hill is a legendary destination and is a “must visit” for anyone in the Sunshine State, but in the spirit of our project we’ll head closer to the waves and tee it up at St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton. Palmer’s stamp is here, too, on one of the club’s two excellent golf courses (Gene Bates designed the other one). It’s the home course of LPGA pro Morgan Pressel, there are 15 tennis courts, a top spa, bridge, tremendous dining and other activities on site, but ultimately we love this place for its traditional Florida charm and character. The perfect place to put you in a summer state of mind.

STA N D R E WS CC .CO M

PUERTO RICO A two-and-a-half-hour flight from Miami, Puerto Rico has long been a hotspot for holidays and for golf. Flamboyant pro Chi Chi Rodriguez hails from here and used to caddy at Dorado Beach Resort’s “East Course” before becoming the club’s head pro. Today the East Course is the flagship layout at TPC Dorado Beach at Dorado Beach Resort, one of the newest clubs to join the PGA TOUR’s TPC Network. There are four courses at the club, each offering a different personality and level of challenge. Together they establish an oasis of golf in the Caribbean that any traveler would be happy to visit—if not to call home. Add great dining, luxury accommodations and top service and this was an easy pin to put on our map.

TP C.COM/DOR ADOBEACH

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S P E C I A L R E P O R T: S O U T H A F R I C A Our intrepid correspondent Paul Trow doesn’t like heights, wild animals or “energy-sapping humidity,” as he puts it.

Despite that, the Brit donned his pith helmet and spent 10 days on a golfing safari (he made time for a real safari as well) as a guest of the Sun International group of hotels and resorts in South Africa, a nice hop across the Atlantic from Puerto Rico. From Trow’s report: I began my trip just outside of Durban, in the touristfriendly suburb of Umhlanga, radiant with Indian Ocean views and abuzz with restaurants, clubs and bars. A friend gave me a whistle-stop tour, stopping by the golf courses at Durban Country Club and Beachwood, and the renowned seafront Oyster Box hotel. With only 36 hours here, I didn’t have time to see San Lameer Country Club, the fabled Tom Weiskopf layout at Fairmont Zimbali Lodge or Peter Matkovich’s much-praised design at Prince’s Grant. Rather, I headed to Sun City, home to the Palace of the Lost City, South Africa’s grandest casino and the Gary Player Country Club where the Nedbank Golf Challenge has been held since 1981. Sun International also own 5-star hotels in Cape Town (Table Bay), Johannesburg (Maslow) and Zambia (Royal Livingstone). While the Maslow is mainly devoted to midweek business guests, the resorts in Cape Town, Sun City and Livingstone are havens of recreation, astutely packaged as the SUNLUX Golden Triangle, three essential bases for anyone seeking to compress a lifetime of holidays into less than a fortnight. Roughly two-and-a-half hours’

drive north of Jo’burg. my first “exotic” experience here was a twilight safari in the Pilanesberg National Park. There I saw an elephant, a lion, jackals and vultures, three giraffes, a hippopotamus and numerous darting impala, springboks, warthogs, baboons, monkeys and helmeted guinea fowl. No crocodiles this time, but we saw plenty the following day in the infamous pit in front of the green on the par-3 13th hole at the Lost City course. Only a fool would attempt to retrieve a misdirected ball here. From there it was 18 holes on the Gary Player Country Club course, unquestionably a tough test with some lengthy carries. From Jo’burg, it was a two-hour flight to Cape Town to stay at the Table Bay Hotel, less than than five miles by ferry from World Heritage site Robben Island where the late President Nelson Mandela spent 18 of the 27 years he was imprisoned by the apartheid regime. An hour inland got us to Pearl Valley Golf & Country Estate, a 12-year-old track that’s hosted the South African Open three times—and it’s easy to see why: Every hole we played was visually stimulating and most were challenging as well. Three other courses in this region also come highly recommended: Royal Cape and Steenberg, both in Cape Town, and Arabella, near the whale-watching town of Hermanus. From here I went on to Zimbabwe, easily accessed, and had more adventures and more terrific golf. By the end of my 10 astonishing days of criss-crossing southern Africa, I left positively determined to return.

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REPUBLIC OF MALDIVES The Shangri-La Villingili Resort and Spa is one of those jaw-dropping destinations that sets so many cold city-dwellers to dreaming. With thatched luxury villas suspended over tourmaline blue waters and long strips of white sand gilding lush islands all around the remote property, the resort has a full-service 24-hour business center, villa butler service, yacht excursion to the Equator (nearby), top dining, a great spa and so much more. But it’s the 9-hole Villingili Golf Course that makes this place truly special for golfers. With its impeccably designed array of six par-3 and three par-4 holes set on 18.5 acres amidst coconut palms, quiet lagoons and tropical flora, and with a fully stocked pro shop, it’s a true “world away” golf experience.

SHANGRI-L A.COM

THAILAND The Maldives put us in a good mood, and so it only makes sense that our next stop is the “Land of Smiles,” as Thailand is called. Technically the Kingdom of Thailand, the country is a royal treat indeed, with friendly people, gorgeous landscapes and superb golf. The Santiburi Country Club at Chiang Rai is lovely, with its broad views and rolling hills. Golfers here might feel like explorers, so lush are the surroundings, and the feeling one gets after a round, sitting at the clubhouse that overlooks the course, is pure serenity.

SANTIBURI.COM/CHIANGR AI

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NEW ZEALAND

FIJI

You can’t be on a golfing safari and not stop here.

With 393 golf clubs for its population of 4 million, the country is second only to Scotland in terms of golf courses per capita, making Kiwis about as golf-friendly as one can imagine. Rich with choices, it’s tough to decide where to play on our limited schedule, but we’re headed for The Hills Golf Course in Queenstown. Home of the NZ Open, the former deer farm is rugged, dramatic and simply stunning.

Native grasses, wetland areas and waterways, rocks and even sculptures by local artists can be found here, making this top-rated golf course a cinematic destination, indeed.

Is it a fantasy or is it real? Fiji has inspired so many island dreams over the years that it’s only right that we stop here for a round or two of golf. Native son Vijay Singh will certainly be familiar with the Natadola Bay Championship Golf Course at the Intercontinental Fiji Golf Resort & Spa. The coral reefs just offshore can be seen from this course, along with lush rainforest, rolling pastures and plenty of beachfront. Set to host the Fiji International for the next five years, it’s a top stop for sun-loving golfers. There are other options as well, including the Denarau Golf & Racquet Club with its water hazards on 15 holes, the Robert Trent Jones, Jr.-designed Pearl Championship Golf Course, set along one of Fiji’s longest beaches, and Laucala Island’s Golf Course, designed by Scotsman David McLay Kidd against the stunning backdrop of an unspoiled old coconut plantation. A golfing paradise, to be sure.

THEHILLS.CO.NZ

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H AWA I I Paradise for surfers and golfers alike, we’ll happily let the board set have everything from the sand out to sea, which leaves us with the incredible rolling hills, gentle trade winds, swaying palms, epic vistas and brilliant nature of golf here in the most remote islands on earth. With so many choices in Hawaii, but with little time left on our schedule, we’re stopping at the Hilton Waikoloa Village on the Big Island. Featuring two courses—The Beach Course and The King’s Course—this is a perfect spot for those short of time and big on golfing ambitions. The island is home to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and the still-erupting Kilauea, and so it should come as no surprise that the out-of-bounds areas include plenty of lava. The Beach Course’s No.10 is a favorite photo spot, playing along the crashing waves and dramatic coast, but both courses offer enough beauty and aloha spirit to last a lifetime. Such a shame we’re nearing the end of our trip and can’t stay longer.

H I LT O N WA I KO LO AV I L L A G E .CO M

CALIFORNIA Coming full circle, we’ll end our once-in-a-lifetime journey back in California, in Palm Springs at the legendary La Quinta Resort & Club. A desert oasis since the 1920s, La Quinta’s adobe casitas have hosted the likes of Clark Gable (who came with friends), Greta Garbo (who liked to be alone), Frank Capra (who did a lot of writing here) and countless others, all in search of a little piece of quiet paradise where they could let loose, let go and relax. For us, the 90 holes of golf available here—90 holes!—will keep us occupied as we reflect on our around-theworld journey. Guests can walk to Pete Dye’s Dunes and Mountain Courses, while three of PGA WEST’s courses are just a short drive away. All of it played out under the desert’s stars, just in time for us to begin thinking about what the newly burgeoning summer here at home will hold for us.

L A Q U I N TA R E S O R T.C O M

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DISCOVER A N EW WORLD OF GOLF

U R B A N G O L F, B E R L I N

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15 holes of fame Kingdom’s exclusive series of dream golf courses—each amalgamating golf holes from around the world of the same number—reaches famous 15s. From our first hole at St Andrews to our last at San Antonio, we have created a layout of impossible variety—literally, that is—bringing together some 15th holes of history, some we believe to be history-makers-in-waiting, and others just because of their down-right shank-inducing beauty

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Dan Murphy / stonehousegolf.com

1 Jubilee Course, St Andrews, Scotland PAR 4, 346 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 10 Our composite course begins where the game itself began, as we pay homage to St Andrews. After the Old and the New courses at St Andrews came the Jubilee, which was built as 12 holes for beginners in 1897. It was laid out under the direction of “Custodian of the St Andrews Links,” Old Tom Morris, who turned 76 that year and yet remained an indomitable force. In a move to relieve demand for play on the Old and New, the popular Jubilee was extended to 18 by greenkeeper Hugh Hamilton in 1906, under the watchful eye of Morris, who had reluctantly retired by then to become “Consultant greenkeeper.” In 1988, Englishman Donald Steel succeeded in transforming the Jubilee from the gentlest of links into a truly formidable test.

All the talk is of the Old Course, but to get a true flavor of St Andrews golf, the New and Jubilee cannot be ignored.

The 15th of the Jubilee—Steel’s Gem—is a short yet narrow par-4, and only 346 yards off the yellow tees, but golfers need to find the left of the fairway to earn a clear view of a raised green. While St Andrews’ customary pot bunkers do not feature here, the slopes off the putting surface will send errant shots on towards thriving patches of gorse and rough.

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Reflection Bay, Las Vegas, Nevada PAR 5, 512 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 11

Reflection Bay Golf Club is the centerpiece of the Lake Las Vegas residential community, an oasis amid the Nevada hills and yet just 15 minutes from the Vegas strip. The waterside course opened in 1998, and as host of the Wendy’s 3Tour Challenge from 1998 to 2007, the club has entertained golfers including Phil Mickelson, Fred Couples, Bubba Watson and John Daly.

When pros arrive at the par-5 15th they play to a yardage of 544, but for our fantasy compilation we are going to play off the much more civilized white tees at 512 yards—still a three-shotter for most golfers, but maybe a two-shotter for bigger hitters who can keep the ball on the freeway.

This hole is tough enough without playing from the tips, with a considerable stretch of scrubland to clear from the tee before drives find the first section of fairway. A broad gulley runs across the fairway to ensure the biggest hitters need to take care of their yardage off the tee, before a trio of bunkers in front of the green await under-cooked approach shots.

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South Course, Manua Lani Resort, Hawaii

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PAR 3, 158 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 18

The South Course at Manua Lani is the archetypal Hawaiian golf course, with green fairways accented by blackened lava rock and white sand bunkers, and a variety of shoreline holes. The South Course was home to the Senior Skins Game from 1990 to 2000, which became one of Arnold Palmer’s favorite winter stops. Palmer won the Senior Skins three times in the space of four years on the South Course, in 1990, 1992 and 1993, and appeared in the event 20 times.

The striking South Course on Big Island wends through the dark rock of the prehistoric Kaniku lava flow, and its par-3 15th is one of the most photographed and televised holes in world golf. A testing 196 yards from the tips for pros, we are opting for the more sociable blue tee at 158 yards, to make this an ideal nearest-the-pin candidate.

Even from the blue tee, golfers still need a true strike to avoid the Pacific waters that roll into the small cove on the left-hand side. The exposed hole location means shots are often, inevitably, left to the mercy of the trade winds.

Quail Hollow Club, Charlotte, North Carolina PAR 5, 497 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 8

Quail Hollow is home to the PGA TOUR’s Wells Fargo Championship. Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy (twice) and Rickie Fowler have all lifted trophies here. The George Cobb course opened in 1961 and both Arnold Palmer and Tom Fazio have had a hand in updating and extending the layout, and the 2017 PGA Championship will be held here.

The 15th is a hooker’s demise. A lake encroaches from the left and inside the elbow of a dogleg before golfers can contemplate the green. A par-5 of 566 yards on tour, but a more inviting 497 for us off the “Quail II” tee, this is plenty for an uphill battle. It can be a long walk for amateurs, although the 15th is where most eagles on the course are scored by tour pros. Golfers need to play 15 well, because the “Green Mile” follows, which is arguably the toughest closing trio on the PGA TOUR. A birdie hole for some and an eagle for a few, J.B. Holmes went one better by holing out with his second shot in the third round in 2011.

Patrick Drickey / stonehousegolf.com

3

5 The K Club, Kildare, Rep. of Ireland PAR 4, 407 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 2 The K Club’s Palmer course is one of the great modern, parkland layouts, as so vividly illustrated when it staged the 2006 Ryder Cup. That was a week when Tom Lehman’s US team could never quite shift the momentum away from Ian Woosnam’s charging Europeans, but win or lose, the course offered up a string of fascinating match play holes.

Not least the 15th, “Pheasant Run.” A par-4 reaching 446 yards in the Ryder Cup, but down to a still formidable 407 on our card, a lake taunts golfers to the right, with

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the fairway adding menace by sloping towards the hazard.

Woodland to the left leave golfers with little bailout from the tee, before a second shot must be played partially blind and uphill to the green. The best line in to the green is from the right-hand side, should golfers dare take on the water.

In a pro-am to open the Palmer Course, Lee Trevino played with course owner, Dr. Michael Smurfit, and made light of one of the most challenging holes on the Palmer course by holing his second shot for an eagle.

Dan Murphy / stonehousegolf.com

6 Seminole GC, North Palm Beach, Florida PAR 5, 475 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 14

The Santaluz Club, San Diego, California PAR 4, 385 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 7

Just as many pro baseball teams head to Florida for Spring Training, well, so did Ben Hogan, spending the whole of March at Seminole. Amid the palm trees of North Palm Beach, this was Hogan’s pre-season tune-up before starting his tournament schedule at the Masters.

Hogan said: “If I were a young man going on the pro tour, I’d try to make arrangements to get on Seminole. If you can play Seminole, you can play any course in the world.”

Unfortunately for those inclined to follow Hogan’s lead, Seminole is probably the most exclusive club in the Sunshine State. They even turned Jack Nicklaus away. They say that if you are chairman of IBM you will get into Augusta National, and you might get into Seminole.

Closely hugging Florida’s Atlantic shoreline, the linksy Seminole course is famous for its battalion of white-sand bunkers, and was designed by Donald Ross and opened in 1929. It’s 15th hole is a par-5 with water to be avoided both from the tee and into the green—a slicer’s hell. The hole measures 497 yards from the back and 475 yards from our preferred blue tee, and it is made distinct by a row of trees that splits the fairway into two parallel stretches. Playing safe to the left adds considerable yardage.

Sprawled around undulating, lakeside slopes in Black Mountain Ranch, to the north of San Diego, The Santaluz Club is as much an idyllic nature reserve as it is one of the finest golf courses in Southern California.

The championship course was designed by the renowned Rees Jones. Says Jones: “My philosophy for course design is to create an environment for golf that is challenging, fair, and aesthetically pleasing. I would rather create a natural, classic course that blends with its surroundings than a course full of unnecessary gimmicks which discourage the average golfer.”

The Santaluz Club is a prime embodiment of this philosophy, and its 15th hole stands out. Measuring 407 yards from the back, we are opting for the blue tee yardage of 385, and with the hole running uphill from beginning to end, this represents the longest 385 yards on our composite course. Tee shots need to clear a valley before reaching the safety of the fairway, while golfers need to factor in expansive fairway bunkers, right and left, when club-selecting off the tee. The hole culminates with a green that opens up to a far-reaching panorama over Black Mountain Ranch.

Patrick Drickey / stonehousegolf.com

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8

Olivos Golf Club, Buenos Aires, Argentina

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PAR 5, 480 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 12

Olivos has 27 holes designed by the Ohio-born Luther Koontz. Koontz was Alister Mackenzie’s engineer on a South American trip in 1930, to support the Augusta National architect’s fulfillment of a number of course commissions, including the design of the celebrated 36 holes at The Jockey Club in Buenos Aires.

Koontz stayed on in Argentina after Mackenzie’s departure and his work at Olivos has set the stage for a variety of tour events over the decades.

The 15th at Olivos (or the sixth hole of the club’s Colorada nine) plays as a par-4 when the pros are in competition, but we like it as the tight par-5 the members play. A tree-lined dogleg right, it was one of local hero Roberto De Vicenzo’s favorite holes, featuring an ovalshaped pond in front of the green. The putting surface is also well protected by bunkers so a lot can go wrong with approach shots.

Champion Course, PGA National, Florida PAR 3, 163 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 13

And so, welcome to the “Bear Trap,” arguably the toughest three-hole stretch on the PGA TOUR. The Champion course at PGA National was originally designed by Tom & George Fazio, before being reworked by Jack Nicklaus in 2014, and it is home to the Honda Classic. The Bear Trap incorporates holes 15, 16 and 17.

Wrote Karen Crouse of The New York Times: “The Champions layout at PGA National is 7,140 yards of venom, a king cobra of a course that rises without warning to strike down the world’s best golfers. Snake charmers may have a better chance of taming it.”

The par-3 15th is a slicer’s nightmare, with a lake dominating short of the green, to the right and long. Playing 176 yards on tour, and perhaps a club shorter on our card at 163 off the gold tee, a broad bunker awaits a pulled tee shot, although golfers are permitted a bail-out area, short and left.

Says Nicklaus: “It’s about precision. It’s about guts.”

10 Quarry Course, Black Diamond Ranch, Florida PAR 4, 371 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 9 Take an abandoned dolomite quarry, complete with lake, quarry rock faces and the sharp elevation changes that come with them, throw Tom Fazio into the middle to make sense of it all, and what you get is one of the finest residential golf courses in the United States.

Black Diamond Ranch is a 45-hole community in Lecanto, Florida, where Fazio designed the Quarry and Ranch courses in 1987. “Every course is special, but I guess you could say the Quarry Course was one of the milestones in my career,” says Fazio.

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The Quarry’s 15th brings swathes of both the lake and the rock face to bear. This hole is not long but anything resembling the right-handed hook off the tee will rapidly get that sinking feeling, or if it’s lucky, perhaps nestle in the broad bunkering that hugs the lakeside from the beginning of the hole to its end. The rock face should serve as nothing more than a striking backdrop to the green, but over-hit or sliced approaches may suffer.

Oh, and we’re going off the back tee here—at 371 yards why shorten the experience?

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Providing Peace of Mind Since 2003.

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Hirono Golf Club, Kobe, Japan

Royal St. David’s GC, Harlech, Wales

PAR 5, 568 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 4

PAR 4, 427 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 1

A “genuine three-shotter” to some might not be a threeshotter to all. Take the mighty 15th hole at Hirono in Japan. 568 yards from the back today, it was only three yards shorter when Jack Nicklaus arrived for an exhibition match in 1963. First he striped a drive 285 yards down the 15th fairway, perfectly right of center to open up the dogleg-left corner (and don’t forget, that was a driver made with a persimmon head and steel shaft). Then Hirono’s club captain informed the Golden Bear that in 30 years of golf since Hirono’s conception, no one had ever reached the 15th green in two.

Nicklaus pulled out his three-wood and struck the ball with all he had. It shot off the clubface like a bullet, sailed over the front bunkers and landed on the putting surface.

Gasps of disbelief from the gallery erupted into raucous celebration. It was as if Nicklaus had felled Godzilla. The hole sticks at 568 on our card so we can fully appreciate its length—the longest hole of our compilation.

Hirono, in Kobe, was designed by Englishman Charles Alison and opened in 1932. Alison had worked with Harry Colt at Sunningdale and St. George’s Hill near London, and the dark-wood pines of Hirono give this course the same English heathland character.

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West Links, North Berwick, Scotland PAR 3, 178 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 16

North Berwick Golf Club is among the oldest clubs in the world. Just like the Old Course at St Andrews—further north, on the other side of the Firth of Forth—historians cannot be certain of when golf was first played on the land that occupies the West Links, but it is safe to assume it dates back to the 17th century. The club itself was formed in 1832, and North Berwick is understood to be the 13th oldest golf club in the world.

Along with St Andrews, Musselburgh and Prestwick in the west, North Berwick formed one corner of the great, epic money matches played by the finest players of the mid 19th century, and it seems to be a miscarriage that North Berwick would remain the only one of these four great Scottish courses not to stage the [British] Open.

North Berwick’s 15th hole, “Redan,” is one of the classic par threes of world golf. Measuring 190 yards from the back, but 178 on our card, the green features a marked slope down from left to right, and differing pin positions demand a broad variety of tee shots. No matter what shot is required, they all have one thing in common; an absolute need for precision.

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Royal St. David’s is one of the great British links courses, yet not as famous as others as it has never hosted The [British] Open, and because of its location on the western shoreline of Wales. From most places, Royal St. David’s is a long haul.

Founded in 1894, St. David’s was originally laid out by one of its founders, Harold Finch-Hatton, before it was updated and extended by Fred Hawtree. The Prince of Wales was captain in 1934, before being crowned King Edward VIII, but it was King Edward VII before him who granted the club his Royal patronage. The imposing Harlech Castle, with its grey-stone turrets, sits on a hillside high above the golf course, as if it is still keeping guard as it did once being built in 1299 by Edward I. The par-4 15th measures 439 yards from the back but we are going from the regular men’s mark of 427, and golfers will be thankful if they are playing into the prevailing wind. Playing towards Mount Snowdon in the distance, there are no bunkers to avoid on this hole, but with the ever-present breezes and the natural dunes and sand hills, the hole is armed with all the protection it needs.

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Patrick Drickey / stonehousegolf.com

14 Kingsbarns Golf Links, Fife, Scotland PAR 3, 185 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 15 They have played golf on the linksland of Kingsbarns in Fife since the 18th century at least and the Kingsbarns Golf Society was formed in 1793. Today’s Kyle Philips championship course, built by American Mark Parsinen, opened to immediate acclaim in 2000.

Making spectacular use of rugged coastline, the great advantage Kingsbarns has over its older links cousins up the road at the “Home of Golf” is higher altitude, offering golfers the far-reaching North Sea views that low-lying St Andrews cannot match. Kingsbarns has joined St Andrews and Carnoustie as co-hosts of the European Tour’s annual

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Galloway National Golf Club, New Jersey PAR 4, 409 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 5

A short drive from the casino floors of Atlantic City, yet the polar opposite in environment and atmosphere, Galloway National is one of America’s great golfing hideaways. It is a private club guarding a Tom Fazio masterpiece that opened in 1995. Some holes are exposed to the winds that whip across Reeds Bay, while others are sheltered by thick, impenetrable forest.

Galloway’s 15th is a 433-yard par four from the tips but a more accessible 409 from the Blue tee we are prescribing. Sound course management here is crucial, as the fairway leads up to a gaping crater of sand and scrub, with the narrowest margin of fairway sliding around to its right.

Golfers have around 270 yards to the front of the crater, and left-sided drives offer the clearest line into the green. A cedar tree of considerable dimensions blocks entry from the right.

Getting a game at Galloway National is about who you know. Its website unashamedly declares that “a rich golf experience awaits a select few.”

Alfred Dunhill Links Championship.

The Tour pros play the 15th at 212 yards, but the “Medal” yardage of 185 is more than adequate for our card. Golfers must tee off over the water’s edge to reach a green that fits snugly into a small promontory into the North Sea. Unlike the 15th at Cypress Point (which follows shortly), which bears similarity in shape in two dimensions at least, Phillips brought in a significant bail-out area down the left-hand side of the green, a feature entirely in keeping with the golfing philosophy at Kingsbarns by which golfing punishment is kept to a minimum.

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Augusta National Golf Club, Georgia PAR 5, 530 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 6

Augusta’s 15th, “Firethorn,” is the last of the famous quartet of par-5s here. It plays 530 yards in the Masters and we will honor it on our card, on a hole that drives down the heart of the course, as straight as a Jordan Spieth short iron.

With water in front of the raised green and also behind, history measures the 15th as the Masters’ secondhardest par-5, after the longer uphill eighth. Gene Sarazen once made light of the challenge when he holed out with his second shot during the 1935 Masters. They called it the “shot heard ’round the world,” and Sarazen would eventually prevail for his seventh and last major triumph.

The pros have to play straight and long from the tee to have a chance of reaching the green in two, and most Masters golfers would rather do that than lay-up and send a high wedge onto the green. Too much backspin, and the ball will sink into the creek in front. The hole poses a timeless, classic par-5 challenge, and no wonder so many Masters patrons gather around the 15th green every April.

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Cypress Point Club, California PAR 3, 139 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 17 Samuel F. B. Morse, who directed the development of Cypress Point in the late 1920s, said: “No one but a poet should be allowed to write of the beauties of the Cypress Point Club.”

By all accounts, Morse was not a man to cross. Gulp.

Well, poetic or not, the 15th at Cypress Point cannot be omitted from our 18 because this is probably the most visually stunning, awe-inspiring par-3 in world golf.

It was not the most difficult hole at the exclusive Cypress Point Club for Alister Mackenzie to create. The tee, some 60 feet above the Pacific waters that roll in from three sides, is perched above the rocks on one side of a narrow inlet, with the green sitting invitingly on the other side. A troop of six bunkers both decorate and protect the broad putting surface, with a backdrop of dark green, wind-beaten cypress trees.

It’s a wedge for some golfers, a mid-iron for others, and apart from allowing for the ever-present sea breezes, this should not be a complicated tee shot. A golfer’s biggest obstacle is the desperation to hit a tee shot that befits the hole. That is not easily achieved.

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Kingdom Scorecard – 15 holes of fame Hole Course

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TPC San Antonio AT&T Oaks Course, Texas PAR 4, 423 YARDS, STROKE INDEX 3

In contrast to the typical smash-and-grab, big and broad courses of modern tour golf, there is a retrospective quality about the AT&T Oaks Course at TPC San Antonio, designed by Greg Norman and Sergio Garcia and opened in 2010. Home to the Valero Texas Open, the Oaks Course wends through woodlands, its narrow fairways demand precision over power, while its bunkering provides a degree of punishment more in keeping with Britain’s ancient parkland layouts.

Says former world No.1 Norman: “The topographic subtleties of the rolling Texas country terrain, framed by magnificent stands of mature live oaks, create a pristine natural setting that is as playable as it is beautiful.”

The tour pros play the 15th on the Oaks Course to a testing 464 yards, but we are opting for the “Players” tee at 423. From here the 15th remains formidable and the ideal closing test for our dream 18. With a gentle right-to-left bend, a narrow fairway is framed by woodland, although mounding around parts of the fairway will offer generous bounces to some shots that stray towards the fringes.

Accuracy is critical with the approach, as broad sand traps guard each side of the front of a narrow green.

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Par

Yards

S.I.

4 5 3 5 4 5 4 5 3

346 512 158 497 407 475 385 480 163

10 11 18 8 2 14 7 12 13

38

3,423

4 5 3 4 3 4 5 3 4

371 568 178 427 185 409 530 139 423

Back Nine

35

3,230

Total

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6,653

Front nine 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

St Andrews (Jubilee) Reflection Bay Mauna Lani (South) Quail Hollow K Club (Palmer) Seminole The Santaluz Club Olivos PGA National (Champions)

Front Nine Back Nine 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Black Diamond Ranch (Quarry) Hirono North Berwick Royal St. David’s Kingsbarns Galloway National Augusta National Cypress Point TPC San Antonio (Oaks)

9 4 16 1 15 5 6 17 3

Every traveler is different, and each deserves a unique travel experience. That is why all aspects of Uniworld’s award-winning itineraries are meticulously designed to please one person—YOU. Our all-inclusive European cruises feature one-of-a-kind ships, superb personalized service thanks to fewer staterooms and more staff than any other river cruise line, a wide choice of excursions and delicious cuisine paired with distinctive wine. This journey is uniquely perfect for you, because you deserve the best.

You deserve the best For more information, contact your preferred Travel Professional.

Call Uniworld at 800-733-7820 or visit us online at uniworld.com/uniquelyuniworld.

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Plane Game The following aircraft and flight services are fueled up and waiting to get you to some beautiful golf. Whether you’re riding in the back or sitting up front, pack light, climb aboard, and arrive at your tee time in style. Aviator shades not required (but recommended)

Piper M350

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Piper Aircraft The company that made quality aircraft available to aspiring pilots everywhere with the lauded Piper Cub hasn’t missed a beat after nearly 80 years in the air. With more than 130,000 planes delivered to satisfied aviators around the world, Piper is still flying high with a range of aircraft to satisfy top executives and enthusiasts alike. PGA TOUR pro Morgan Hoffman is a fan, flying himself from tournament to tournament in his turbocharged six-seat Piper Lance. This November he Tweeted his enjoyment of a Piper factory tour and test flight in the company’s M500, a newer six-seater that features the latest in power and electronics and which, like the top-shelf M600, delivers efficient and supremely capable transportation to those who won’t sacrifice performance or luxury in their aircraft. Fast, beautiful, equipped with the latest electronics and safety features and backed by an unassailable reputation for quality, Piper’s aircraft ensure that your money and time are well spent, whether you’re sitting up front or relaxing in the back. piper.com

Destination: Dismal River Mullen, Nebraska It’s quiet here, beautifully quiet, and with its epic golf courses set among Nebraska’s majestic Sand Hills, sleep in the rustic/luxurious cabin accommodations at Dismal River will be followed by your waking up believing that you’re still in a land of dreams—and you will be. Golf designed by Jack Nicklaus and Tom Doak, a warm clubhouse that serves as a base of operations, a meeting house and an elegant place to relax when the day is done with its dedicated poker room, billiards area, and three-screen theater, and a restaurant and lounge that deliver perfect Nebraska beef and top-shelf libations, all combine to make Dismal River one of the most exclusive and distinctly American experiences available. A favorite of VIPs and dedicated golf fans, Dismal River is best reached by a private plane to nearby North Platte Regional Airport, but it’s also accessible for those who want to savor hours of wide-open country rolling by the car’s windows. dismalriver.com

Piper’s top-of-range M600 is a superb and efficient aircraft that can get you wherever you need to be

Dornier Seastar Looking like a cross between a seaplane from a classic film and a luxury vehicle from the future, the impeccably engineered Dornier Seastar from Dornier Seawings is a serious aircraft, providing both land and water capability in a beautifully designed package. Capable of holding 12 passengers and traveling 900 nautical miles at a maximum cruise speed of 180 ktas, the plane is a class leader capable of landing on both runway and water surfaces, even under rough conditions. The cockpit is as stunning as the exterior, featuring Honeywell’s state-of-the-art Primus Epic 2.0 avionic suite with all kinds of advanced functions, while the comfortable main cabin has a number of configuration options, including the option of a lavatory along with elegant leather seats. Capable in the extreme, fly the Seastar as a yacht or waterfront property access, as an airport-toairport vehicle, or as a means of reaching remote ocean bays or coves or any other land or water destination. Beautiful, able, efficient and luxurious, Dornier Seawings has built an amazing aircraft with the Seastar, a plane that opens up even more of the world to you. dornierseawings.com

Destination: Whistler Golf Club Whistler, British Columbia, Canada Before Arnold Palmer designed Whistler Golf Club, he said the only way to arrive here was by seaplane, landing on the nearby Alta Lake, and we think that’s still a great way to visit this epic golf experience set high amidst the snowcapped mountains of British Columbia. Just two hours north of Vancouver, Whistler is a skier’s and snowboarder’s paradise when the snow falls. But when the sun’s shining, it’s all about golf. The Whistler Resort is nearby, with all the amenities one could want for a brilliant vacation. But for us the best part of the area is certainly the Whistler Golf Club’s Palmer Course, an award-winning track that features a great practice area, Academy and stunning views. When the day is done, Palmer’s Bar & Grill serves up the perfect place to relax, making this an ideal place to gather with friends for a friendly game—no matter how you arrive. whistlergolf.com

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Nicholas Air Commercial travel is an incredible headache, and perhaps you’re not interested in owning an aircraft, so what to do… Nicholas Air has an innovative answer to flight needs with its efficient and flexible options for private air travel.

Dedicated personal travel representatives will sort all details of your flight needs and help to establish the perfect program for you, whether that’s a flight hours purchase on a simple to manage and efficiently priced BLUE Jet Card, a Jet Lease or even a Private Jet Share/Fractional Jet Ownership program.

All aircraft in the Nicholas Air fleet are five years or newer and are 100 percent owned and operated by Nicholas Air, so your dealings with the company will be as straightforward as they are luxurious. Furthermore, the company serves the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, meaning Nicholas Air can get you nearly anywhere you need to be, whether it’s for an important meeting or an important tee time.

Guaranteed availability, direct working relationships with the schedulers and flight crews and all the benefits of private air travel without the headaches, Nicholas Air is a top option for anyone who knows where he’s going and who wants to get there efficiently and in style. No wonder the company’s customers include the likes of NFL quarterback Eli Manning, among others. nicholasair.com

Nicholas Air offers a range of aircraft for customers, including Phenom jets and the PIlatus PC-12 turboprop (above)

Fox Harb’r is as good as it gets, with top golf and other sports on offer in a stunning setting

Destination: Fox Harb’r Resort Nova Scotia, Canada The Atlantic Ocean runs along the edge of the rocky shoreline, the vibrant colors of sea and sky run together over the resort’s elegant grounds, and the runway runs right along the edge of the fairway on the resort’s golf course.

In terms of exclusive remote destinations, Fox Harb’r is about as good as it gets. Gourmet dining and luxury accommodations join skeet shooting and sporting clays, tennis, an on-call luxury yacht, fantastic spa and 27 holes of splendid links-style golf on this elegantly rugged destination, which features both a deep-water marina and a private airstrip. The golf, specifically, is reason enough to visit, with a Graham Cooke-designed Championship Course that Golf Digest named Best New Golf Course in Canada in 2001 and an impeccably well designed 9-hole executive course as well. Stay in one of 86 suites in the oceanfront manor-style guesthouse or in an executive townhouse, dine in one of several on-site options while enjoying a top-flight wine list and beautifully prepared food, and luxuriate in the resort’s spa, which offers a wide range of treatments. Bringing all the beauty of Nova Scotia to you in a stunning resort setting, and with residential opportunities that might compel you to make the resort new home base, Fox Harb’r isn’t just a beautiful place to land, it’s special. foxharbr.com

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Cessna This already legendary company continues to build on its peerless range of business jets, with the new Citation Latitude offering the most spacious and most refined cabin environment in the midsize jet category. A full 77 inches wide, six feet tall and more than 21 feet long with a flat floor and stand-up cabin, this cutting-edge traveler delivers passengers to their destinations in complete comfort— and with all of Cessna’s renowned attention to detail.

Top electronics, impeccable build quality and capabilities (maximum range of 2,850nm, a max cruise speed of 446 ktas and room for nine) make the Citation Latitude a “no brainer” when it comes to meeting the rigorous practical needs of today’s business traveler. Cessna’s reputation for aviation excellence, brilliant design and forward-thinking ethos make the Latitude a positive emotional purchase as well, satisfying all aspects of modern flyers. Backed by a top team of service engineers and services, the Citation Latitude is just another example of how Cessna leads the way when it comes to creating great business jets—and satisfied customers. cessna.com

The new Latitude has the most spacious cabin in the midsize jet category

Destination: Turnberry Firth of Clyde, Scotland With so many accolades online and in print, one could be forgiven for thinking Turnberry was the object of a century-long hagiographic campaign mounted by a secret society of determined Scottish golf writers. As it happens, every bit of flattery heaped upon the legendary property is well deserved. Featuring golf since 1903 and a hotel since 1906, the iconic resort was recently acquired by Donald Trump and rebranded Trump Turnberry Resort. At the moment the property is undergoing a multifaceted $300 million renovation that will see the hotel building and Ailsa course closed until June of 2016. No doubt it will emerge as brilliant as ever with its three golf courses rolling over the dunes and along the rocky edges of the Ayrshire coast and its reputation for top service and amenities intact. As part of the renovation, the private airstrip—which runs close enough to the golf course—is benefitting from a refurbishment as well, we understand, making access to Turnberry even easier for those looking for a quick escape.

Home to four [British] Open Championships, including 1977’s famous “Duel in the Sun” between Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus, and used as a military base in both world wars, Turnberry’s place in history is secure. With operations underway to enhance and to preserve its pedigree, its future is assured as well.

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Big Fun A huge race experience that fits in your game room, courtesy of David Beattie and SlotMods

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M

aybe he was your dad, maybe he was one of your friends dad’s, maybe he was an uncle or someone else, but remember when you were a kid and there was that guy who seemed like the coolest guy ever? The guy who built the skate ramp in the backyard for his kid? Who had the massive model train display running through the living room at Christmas? Who made radio controlled boats and planes and who always ensured everyone had fun when there was a birthday party? On some level, David Beattie is that guy for all of us. After facing some serious career questions at the age of 48, the Michigan native and former operations manager dug deep into the magic of childhood bliss, connected with an early love of slot car racing, and turned it into a business. His hand-built slot car tracks, which are built under his SlotMods company name and which now can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, ride the fine line between being serious game-room furniture, works of art and something else. However they’re regarded, they deliver one thing that no one can deny: pure joy.

“When I was younger, with my older brother, the slot car craze was really heavy in the 1960s. I grew up in the tail end of it,” says Beattie. “Then suddenly, the whole hobby went away.”

In fact, slot car hobby sales reached over $500 million per year in the 1960s, and there were more than 3,000 public race courses in the United States, with many

more around the world. But as Beattie said, the activity’s popularity faded in the 1970s, due in some part to the fact that slot car racing had become the territory of specialists who raced in serious competition. Today there are still regional groups that race and national and international associations that organize formal competitions. (There’s a lone American—Paul Gawronski—in the ISRA world top 10, with a Finnish No.1 and Czechs occupying much of the top 5.) Beyond these groups, however, one would be forgiven for thinking the hobby had pulled into the pits and died. Enter Beattie, who never lost the love.

“It started out as just a hobby, racing slot cars on a plastic track, and I thought there could be a better experience.

I knew guys had made wooden tracks and so I got to work,” says Beattie. He says he partnered with a friend and built a 20 x 20 multi-elevation track in his basement, no small undertaking. In some ways, it might have been therapy for a stressful period of his life. In another, he was on the edge of something exciting.

“I was racing in my basement for my own pleasure, then I lost my job. I was already doing a DIY slot car system that sold for $729, and I’d sold one of those. In summer 2009 a gentleman came over to get a track, saw what I had in my basement, my own large track, and asked ‘Could you build something like that for me? I think there’s a market for these kinds of custom tracks.’

It started out as just a hobby, and I thought there could be a better experience

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“People weren’t hiring 48-year-old operations managers, and so I borrowed some money and here we are.”

What might have seemed like an epic leap of faith to some managed to pay off rather quickly. Beattie said it wasn’t long before he received a commission from Jim Farley, a head of Ford Motor Company in Europe, to make a track based on Laguna Seca for installation in the Detroit area. And with SlotMods up and running, the work really started coming.

“That following summer, I went out to Pebble Beach and made a replica Pebble Beach Raceway, which sold. Jay Leno came through the tent, saw what I had made and befriended me.”

At this point you might be thinking, “Hold on, wait. A slot car track. What’s the big deal?” But if you’re thinking that, then you haven’t seen one of Beattie’s creations.

To even call them “slot car tracks” is a bit misleading in that they’re such a far cry from the black plastic boxed toys so many of us will remember from youth.

SlotMods tracks are more like museum-quality models of race environments, complete with cheering fans, pit crews hard at work, authentic signage and buildings, fencing, wayward pedestrians trying to sneak into the infield, lights, scoreboards, grandstands, race surfaces streaked with tire skid marks and oil, and any other detail that customers want.

“Buildings are constructed out of wood and styrene, kind of like modeling materials you would find in a hobby shop,” Beattie explains.

“The topography, elevation changes, are all carved out of foam by me. The trees are made by hand—there are no plastic trees. Aluminum is aluminum, like in railings and such. The wooden track surface is hand painted with skid marks, cracks and weathering, all by me. We print out banners and signs, finesse them to look real, weather them, use sand and cement for runoff areas, light the base with LEDs and so on. The base can be stained or laminated to a color of someone’s choice.

“We can do custom anything.

If someone wanted a golf course replicated, for example, we could put custom slot car golf carts if they wanted to race those around. There’s nothing that’s motorized and scenic that we can’t handle.”

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Zak Brown, who runs motorsports marketing firms JMI and CSM and who is at the forefront of the motorsports industry, is a fan, smiling big as he shows me around his custom-built track in London, England, which incorporates some of his favorite real-life tracks in its design.

“So coming off the start, we have the Riverside esses, the Nürburgring carousel, the Monaco hairpin followed by the Long Beach hairpin, down into La Source at Spa, up through L’eau Rouge down under the Dunlop Bridge at Le Mans into old three and four at Indianapolis. It’s incredible.”

One of Brown’s associates showed him an interview Leno had done next to one of Beattie’s tracks and the businessman—a racing driver himself—was impressed.

“I was like, ‘That thing’s unbelievable!’” Brown says.

“I told David what corners I wanted—Riverside’s where I grew up, Indy is where I lived—he took the creative license to piece it all together. It took him six to nine months, and the work he did, it’s just amazing.”

In addition to all of the aesthetic touches, the handmade trees, real aluminum railings and such, the electronics in the tracks are incredibly sophisticated as well.

“Our tracks all have lap timing systems,” Beattie says. “You can race for fastest lap, overall winner, lap time speeds. We can build them with integrated cameras, cameras are built into the side, in the scenery, and the feed can be projected onto a large screen or television above a home bar, for example. It will cycle through the various cameras, friends can sit at bar and watch the racing.”

Beattie built a track for an Audi promotion that showcased an amazing level of sophistication, with scale Audis featuring working headlights and cameras in the

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Integrated on-track and even in-car cameras are possible, along with top electronics cars themselves, with the feed displayed on screens, plus iPad control possible from bystanders who approached the installation, which sat in front of an Audi corporate building. The result earned Audi a Clio advertising award and yielded a documentary film on Beattie and on the project entitled Painting Coconuts, which can be viewed on SlotMods website (slotmods.com).

“It’s fun, we set these things up at shows and people line up all weekend,” Beattie says. “I did one for [racing

great] Bobby Rahal, it was like Christmas morning he was so excited.”

Speaking of the holidays: SlotMods made the coveted Neiman Marcus Christmas Book with a $300,000 raceway that included visits from pro racing legends to “cohost your inaugural race night party.” The starting price for a track purchased direct from SlotMods is closer to $50,000 for a detailed setting that measures 6x12, but, as with the Neiman Marcus project, Beattie has built tracks costing far more and can accommodate nearly any reasonable request from a client.

For your money you get the incredible hand-built track plus custom delivery and installation from Beattie and his team. Often the tracks have to be transported in sections in semi-trucks, and then assembled later on site. The cars are 1/32nd scale, roughly 7 inches long, and come from top makers in Italy, Germany and Spain. Like the tracks, there are high-end cars available completely customized, as was evident in Zak Brown’s collection, which had several JMI-branded cars and a perfect model of an Audi that Brown races as part of his United Autosports team.

Once everything’s in place, the fun begins. An ultimate man cave gathering point, Beattie says the tracks often become the new centerpieces of conversation.

“One gentleman said it the best: he said he had a huge car collection, and with car collections what are you going to do? People look at them, and then that’s it. We’d installed the track in the area where he had part of his collection and now, the man said, ‘We look at the cars, then we make it over to the track and the real socializing begins—drinking, smoking cigars, racing.’ Some of these guys’ pool tables are kind of on idle now.

“And with others, it’s really become part of family fun,

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whether it’s dads or grandfathers or the kids. Some of these men are older and want to connect with their grandchildren.

It makes sense. If you’re going to spend this kind of money, you can be a hermit, but the majority do it for family.

“The experience is beyond expectations; you’re not going to understand it until we bring it to you. It’s about family fun, and it’s about racing, and that’s a good thing.”

Palmer, Fazio, Hills, Byrd built six championship courses...

...We built the rest.

7 Dining Options 5 Pools 4 Clubhouses 3 Tennis Complexes 33 Har-Tru Courts 1 48,000 Square Foot Fitness Center 1 Golf Cart Ride Away 1 Membership Located minutes from historic Savannah, The Landings Club provides a wide variety of resort-class amenities.

Our private residential Club provides unlimited opportunities to meet and socialize with friends. With events and activities happening every day of the year, you can be as active or relaxed as you choose.

For more information visit www.landingsclub.com.

THRILL OF SPEED.

24, 8 1 6 m p h APOLLO 10.

In the summer of 1817, a German by the name of Baron Karl von Drais rode into history when he presented the people of Mannheim with his new invention: the Laufmaschine.

Today we call it a toddler’s pushbike, but at the time the plank of wood with a seat, two wheels, no pedals and no brakes was a revelation. There’s no record of it, but we’re guessing that the first accident on a Laufmaschine happened shortly after its debut and that it likely involved a large hill. We know this because for whatever reason, men like to go fast, that consequently they don’t always think before they do so, and because charging down a hill on a two-wheeled contraption with no brakes is what we would have done in 1817. Here, then, is a celebration of just a few ways we’ve hurled ourselves through space and time at great speed. As Mario Andretti once said, “If everything feels under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”

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Reaching a top speed of 24,816mph in space, the astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission must have found life on Earth to be incredibly slow. If you’ll recall, Apollo 10 was the “dry run” that had astronauts head out to the moon and back without sending anyone down to the lunar surface.

They made it to the moon and back in an incredible 54 hours, forever changing the scope of what’s meant by a round-trip flight.

1, 2 4 4 b h p HENNESSEY VENOM GT.

MACH 6.72 X-15.

In the 1960s, when the United States Air Force and NASA were pushing the performance airplane envelope with “X-planes,” the svelte X-15 set an official still-standing world record for highest speed ever achieved by a manned, powered aircraft when it hit 4,520mph (Mach 6.72).

Fantastically, 13 of the X-15’s 199 missions met the USAF criterion for spaceflight by reaching an altitude of 50 miles, immediately qualifying the pilots for their astronaut wings (which they received). Of those, two of the flights met the international spaceflight standard of 62.1 miles in altitude as well, making the X-15 the world’s first operational spaceplane.

In February of 2014, the Venom GT from American company Hennessy Performance cracked 270.49mph to set a new world speed record for a two-seat sports car, besting the Bugatti Veyron by a few mph. Racing down the same 3.2-mile runaway at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center where the Space Shuttle used to land, the Venom’s 90-degree, seven-liter V8 used its 1,244bhp to reach the new high mark, but company head John Hennessey says the car can go even faster and that it was held back somewhat by the length of the runway. “I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid,” Hennessey told media after the feat. “Even though the astronaut thing didn’t work out for me, I am humbled to have had the opportunity to set our speed record on the hallowed grounds of the American space program.”

THRUST SSC. Current holder of the Land Speed Record, the Thrust SSC is a British jet car that managed 763mph on October 15, 1997, becoming both the fastest car ever and the first to officially break the sound barrier. Using two Rolls-Royce Spey turbofan engines, just as the British version of the F-4 Phantom II fighter used, Thrust SSC’s 110,000bhp managed the feat while consuming 4.8 gallons of fuel per second. So, not a Prius, then, but an unbelievably exciting vehicle and yet another example both of how far we’re willing to push ourselves and what we can accomplish. Thrust SSC’s successor is currently under development in England.

Named Bloodhound SSC, it’s aiming to reach 1,050mph, which would make it the first land speed vehicle to break 1,000mph and the new record-holder by some margin.

Test runs are set to begin in 2016.

317.60mph SPIRIT OF AUSTRALIA. In October of 1978, Ken Warby piloted his wooden boat to 317.60mph, breaking the 300mph mark on water and living to tell the tale of a record that still stands today. More incredibly, he designed the boat on his kitchen table and built it in his backyard using whatever wood he could afford, and a jet engine he bought on surplus from the Royal Australian Air Force for $60. There were only three power tools used in construction—a belt sander, drill, and a circular saw; the rest of the construction was done with hand tools. A realist even if he’s a bit of a daredevil, Warby had a word for would-be recordbreakers when he was interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald this year: “If you don’t understand what can happen when you put your foot on the throttle, you shouldn’t put your arse in the cockpit.”

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Quick Trips S

ometimes you need to sit under a palm tree on the sand and watch the world float by. But for those times when you need to move, to get in motion, to GO! We say stoke the fire in your belly, get those engines started and get ready to be shoved back in your seat.

Spanning the globe, the following experiences are anything but ways to take it easy. These are ghost peppers covered in Tabasco, amplifiers turned all the way to 11, adrenaline shots straight to the heart. These are quick trips, and they will ensure that whatever mediocrity might be clinging to your day-to-day life will be cleansed, torn away in the jet wash. To those who—as Whitman had it—sound their barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, we salute you.

Good luck, and Godspeed.

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Quentin Tarantino attends the Richard Petty Driving Experience (below); the legend himself, sans cowboy hat and sunglasses (left)

Air Combat If you’ve ever watched Top Gun, The Red Baron, Hell’s Angels or any other film that involves planes in combat and wished that you could have a chance to streak across the sky locked in a dogfight, here’s your chance. Air Combat USA is the original civilian dogfighting school, with more than 20 years of experience and 48,000 guest pilots flown.

More than just some kind of sky ride, the school teaches proper air combat techniques and allows you to engage in dogfights with other participants (a co-worker, perhaps…).

Whether or not you’re a pilot, Air Combat USA will train you in the basics, then you’ll take to the skies with a qualified instructor sitting next to you in a high-performance aircraft where you’ll be able to take the stick and engage in multiple “g-pulling” dogfights. Combat utilizes a proprietary electronic tracking system that verifies an air-to-air “kill” with hits yielding smoke from the “enemy’s” plane. All flights are video recorded for enjoyment later, and as the school has it, “Everything is real… except the bullets!” With heart-in-yourthroat thrills and its one-of-a-kind experience, Air Combat USA will have you turning to your friends on the ground to say, “You can be my wingman anytime.” aircombat.com

NASCAR You can’t miss the cowboy hat, sunglasses, mustache and wide grin—Richard Petty is instantly recognizable, whether or not one knows anything about racing. Only Dale Earnhardt matched Petty’s seven NASCAR Championships, and Petty’s record-setting 200 victories included 27 wins in 1967 alone—10 of them consecutively. He won the prestigious Daytona 500 a record seven times as well, and so it’s fitting that Daytona’s legendary International Speedway hosts one of 17 Richard Petty Driving Experience locations in the country. There are a number of programs available, including one that puts you behind the wheel of a 600hp NASCAR race car for between eight and 50 laps (depending on the program). If you’d rather just ride along they’ll sort that as well, with a professional driver taking you to 165mph during three laps of your favorite track.

With locations at Darlington Raceway, Charlotte Motor Speedway, Atlanta Motor Speedway and other top spots, this is a bucket-list experience for any NASCAR fan, and for any fan of speed in general. Note: donuts in the infield are not recommended. drivepetty.com

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Desert Racer Maybe as a kid you used to charge your remote-controlled car around the sandbox, maybe you saw the Baja 500 on TV once and couldn’t forget it. However it got stuck in your head—or even if it’s never occurred to you before—there is absolutely no denying that bounding through the desert in a dune buggy, jumping over hills and throwing twin rooster tails of sand from your back tires, is a ridiculous amount of fun. Don’t believe us? Head to Wide Open Excursions in Cabo San Lucas or Ensenada, Baja, Mexico. With locations in range of great golf, fishing and more, Wide Open offers a free-spirited experience of a lifetime.

Their guides and instructors make sure you safely get the most out of your desert racing adventure, whether you opt for a tour or a race experience. The Baja Challenge Car vehicles are the same type that routinely survive the challenging SCORE Baja 1000 race, the Wide Open team consists of professionals who can address every need, and the settings provide a veritable playground for corporate events, group fun and individual excursions. Serious adventure, serious racing across the sand, serious fun. An experience you’ll never forget, in a beautiful setting. Bring your own “GO FOR IT!” attitude, or one can be supplied upon start of the engine. wideopenbaja.com

Jet Space Fighter Let’s cut right to it: these guys will put you in a Russian MiG 29 and fly you to the edge of space. Really, what more do you need to know? You’ll suit up and sit in the cockpit of the Miyokan MiG 29 “Fulcrum,” preferred fighter of the Soviet air force, a plane designed to take on the F15, and you will be given the ride of your life. During the flight you’ll be able to take the controls for a bit; you’ll break the sound barrier and fly at supersonic speed; you’ll experience rolls, loops, a split-S, an Immelmann turn, vertical climbs and dives, and the “tail slide” for which the MiG 29 is famous. And then you’ll climb to the edge of space, maybe higher than 70,000 feet depending on the weather. You’ll see the curve of the Earth. The atmosphere below will look like a blue fog. The sky above will be very, very dark and it’ll be covered in stars. The only people higher than you will be the astronauts on the International Space Station. One more time just to make it clear: You will be in a MiG fighter on the edge of space. The. Edge. Of. Space. If you’re at a loss for words, the correct response is: “yes.” migflug.com

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I STAND WITH THE FOLDS OF HONOR. JOIN ME. Nearly 9 out of 10 children and spouses of military service members killed or disabled while serving our great nation do not qualify for Federal financial aid. Folds of Honor proudly stands in the gap by providing educational scholarships to these deserving families.

The need is great. Join me in supporting Folds of Honor and its mission. I am Tom Lehman, and I Stand With The Folds.

LEARN MORE AT WWW.FOLDSOFHONOR.ORG

Formula One

Rubens Barrichello during the Monaco Formula One Grand Prix in 2011

Dragster Ever sat at a red light, looked over at the car next to you and then, perhaps half-subconsciously, done your best to make sure you’re first off the line? Pure Speed Racing understands.

Offering several drag racing experiences, their programs go way beyond the stuff of Beach Boys Saturday nights and right to the long, loud, big-back-tire, spluttering-engine, roaring green-light speed attack that sees you hurtling down the quarter mile with a grin plastered across your face and the world washing by in a hyperwarp color wash. This is drag racing the way Big Daddy Don Garlits liked it. The way the kid you were before you were a man dreamed about it. The way NHRA top racer Doug Foley did it—and good news: this is Doug Foley’s operation. With locations all over the country and a range of programs offering everything from a ride-along to actually qualifying for your NHRA license, all runs will see you with smoke flying, helmet pressed back, and adrenaline in full force. Ever watched your speedo fly past 130 from a complete stop? You won’t here either—you’ll have your eyes on the track, staying in control. You’re in a dragster, man! Watch the speedo on the video replay. And breathe deep: That’s the smell of thunder coming off the tires, and you don’t want to wash it off, ever. purespeedracing.com

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For race fans who like more turns in their track, GP Experience provides the opportunity to drive a real F1 car on an actual Grand Prix circuit—an incredible opportunity, to be sure. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a novice or an accomplished racer already, staff at GPE will walk you through every step of a training program that starts with you getting dressed from head to toe in authentic race apparel. From there it’s time for school to learn about the track configuration, gear selection and more. After that’s sorted, you get to put your newfound skills to the test in a top supercar to condition yourself for the main event— which has you driving a real F1 car for between four and 10 laps. The cars owned by GPE are Williams FW33 Cosworth original chassis cars formerly driven by Rubens Barichello, Pastor Maldonado and Valtteri Bottas—i.e., the real deal.

If all of that seems like too much, GPE staff can take the wheel in a customized F1 car that fits two passengers and a professional driver for a serious ride-along thrill without the schooling. Racing on the Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas, home of The United States Grand Prix, Moto GP and more, GPE is an amazing chance to feel the thrill of F1 for yourself. gpexperience.com

Kurt Busch, driver of the #97 Crown Royal Ford, pulls in for a pit stop during the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series GFS

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STEADY FAST

Zak Brown has never been one to sit still.

Now at the forefront of the motorsports business, he might have one of the best desks in the racing world— but he’s still happiest behind the wheel…

“

H

e’s here,” says Harry, immediately turning from the window and moving to the office door, just before Zak Brown walks through it.

Harry runs Universal Classic Cars, a storage and detail service for elite cars that sits just south of London, England, and he’s tasked with looking after Brown’s collection. As one of the leading businessmen in motorsport, Brown has the money and access to ensure his collection of vintage cars is amazing. But as an emotional collector and a serious driver, it’s not just the value of the collection that compels Brown to keep them with Harry, it’s the vehicles themselves. To Brown, you see, cars are important. And that’s Zak Brown in a nutshell.

Well, part of him anyway. The aspiring Formula One driver from California who moved to England at the age of 18 to pursue his dream before shifting into business and turning motorsports marketing on its head, knows who he is and what he is. At 44, he also knows what he isn’t, and that’s near retirement.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he says, smiling and standing near his mint-condition 1963 Corvette Stingray, parked next to a handful of other stunners from his collection. “Two things: I”ll never retire, and I’ll always be a car guy.”

The day we spoke Brown had just returned from Florida and from a race at Daytona, in which he drove as part of his United Autosports racing team. Far more than just a hobby, racing is the beginning and end of Zak’s business, driving him personally and driving his businesses globally.

“I don’t know,” he says when asked why he likes to go fast. “I think I was a normal kid. I liked my cars and Big Wheels, going to races early on.”

As a young man growing up in Los Angeles, Brown went to races as a spectator with his father, but it was a high school friend who opened the door to getting behind the wheel, as Brown told Car and Driver in May, 2011. Speaking with the magazine’s Steven Smith, Brown explained how he went to school with the nephew of off-road racer Mickey Thompson. His friend’s family took him to the Long Beach Grand Prix, where he met Mario Andretti. Brown asked the legendary Italian champion how an aspiring driver should get into racing, Andretti said “karting,” and so that’s what Brown did—and did well.

He got into it at 15 and was winning within the year. At 18 he moved to England to pursue his dream of becoming a Formula One driver, training under instructor Richard Dean and, later, sleeping on the floor at Dean’s

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Brown’s 2005 deal to get Crown Royal into NASCAR marked the first spirit sponsor in the sport for 40 years

sister’s place when the money ran out. He did well, but “I’m happy we’ve done the biggest deals in the sport,” he couldn’t get his driving to the next level. However, he says. “We’ve done lots of deals and I just want to keep while he was trying, he learned that he was pretty good at doing the next deal, the biggest deal, more deals… Some understanding the world of sponsorships in racing. TWA deals are more important than others, some I’d like to have was his first, sponsoring him with air tickets and later with a hand in, but that kind of ebbs and flows. I’d love to get a small bit of cash. But Brown said he realized that he wasn’t McLaren a title sponsor, for example, and NASCAR needs the driver to get major brands where they needed to be. a title sponsor, they need to get that.”

And so in 1995 he founded sports marketing agency JMI (Just Marketing International), and five years later he left aspirations of a pro driving career behind and committed to marketing full-time. Things changed immediately, and over the years JMI has grown into the premiere marketing agency in motorsport, with a list of achievements that have changed the sport dramatically. In 2005 Brown put Crown Royal whisky with NASCAR, making the brand the first alcoholic spirit sponsor of the sport in over 40 years. In The success of JMI and CSM is certainly driven by 2008 he brought LG into F1, UBS was next in in 2010, Brown’s personal work ethic and motivation. That he never and so on. In 2013 a division of advertising group Chime attended college is hardly a factor for a man who’s highly Communications plc acquired JMI, immediately broadening competitive both on and off the track. the reach of both brands, JMI and CSM. Today, Brown is “It’s more with myself than against other people,” he says. the executive chairman of the company he founded and “At the end of the day I want to beat what I’ve done, I want CEO of CSM. Consequently, he’s one of the biggest forces to use my self-motivation as a driver. I’m a pretty motivated in motorsport. person, I don’t need many people to kick me in the butt.”

We’re the market leader by a big distance, which is great, but we’ve got to keep on it

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No kidding. Today CSM and JMI essentially run motorsports marketing and sponsorships, and there’s no indication that’s going to change any time soon.

“We’re the market leader by a big distance,” Brown says, “which is great, but we’ve got to keep on it: the best way to stay the market leader is to keep beating everyone.

You can fall fast and crash, and I think business is about momentum, and if you’re not going forward you’re going backwards. So not only do I not like to lose, but if you lose twice in a row that can create some bad momentum, so I have a fear of failure.”

Brown says an evaluation of him once showed that he’s primarily self-motivated, that is, that winning for him is also about not losing.

“Some people love to win because they love the thrill of victory, and some people win because they’re scared to lose, and I’m in that category. I kind of have a degree of paranoia that everything could go wrong tomorrow, and that gets you motivated.”

While many in his position might be tempted to micromanage or to get overly involved, Brown’s racing team is an example of his management style, in which he says he’s happy to let people get on with their jobs—and without his interference.

“Especially when it’s something I know they can do better than me,” he says. “I don’t want to run a race team, don’t know how to run a race team. I’m involved in it from a business standpoint, I make sure it’s structurally sound, so

it takes one day a month out of me and then I just like to show up and enjoy it, and that’s kind of the deal I have with Richard [Dean]. He runs it and I help keep it going and we both enjoy it. We’re best buddies so that works.”

The team has done well since it started in 2010, winning races and championships and making great strides, which obviously pleases Brown despite his manic schedule.

“In five years we’ve accomplished a lot, and Richard does a great job, so that’s great. I wouldn’t want to have a losing race team!”

Brown (above); #23 Johnnie Walker Ford Riley driven by Brown, Mark Patterson, Mark Blundell and Martin Brundle at The Rolex 24 at Daytona

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EPSON is just one of JMI’s clients in Formula One

Future, Formula One

Collecting

Brown’s incredible business success from 2000 on, and the joining of forces with JMI and CSM in 2013, had many rushing to anoint him as successor to longtime F1 head Bernie Ecclestone. But Brown is careful when discussing the speculation that he’ll move into a leading role, explaining that he’s enjoying what he’s doing while acknowledging that changes are coming to the top tier of motorsports.

“We’ll see,” he says, when asked if the future is bright and sunny for F1. “It’s not today, maybe, but I think it will be in the future. It’s a massive sport, there’s a lot to manage there and a lot of it’s managed right and a lot of it’s not managed right.

“I know Bernie very well, and he’s done an unbelievable job over the years. He’s singlehandedly more responsible than anyone for the success of Formula One, and he brought it together as an organized group in the late 70s, early 80s. He’s not perfect, and as he gets on I think he could use some more help, it’s a big thing to do for any one person.

But the fans aren’t always easy to please.”

Are they more difficult to please than golf fans?

“Yeah, probably. A difficult bunch,” he says.

Brown’s love for cars is expressed in nearly every facet of his life, and that certainly includes his car collection, the entirety of which Brown is moving to the UK. Unlike some collectors, who are into collecting strictly as an investment, Brown’s collecting has a strong emotional component—“for sure,” he says—and that extends to both his elite supercars and to his incredible collection of race cars. One of the best examples of his emotional investment in cars is an Indianapolis 500-winning car that he coveted, bought, owned and then later sold, and which he now might wish he still had.

“I have a specific collecting criteria,” says Brown. “The car had to win at least one race in its period. I look for a diversity of cars, so I’ve got McLarens and Ferraris and Mercedes and Lotuses so so on. And I want to have it so all my F1 cars were driven by world champions.”

In addition, he says, he drives all of his cars, which brings us to the Indy car.

“I’ve known Eddie a long time,” says Brown, speaking of Eddie Cheever, one of the few Americans to make a go of it in F1 and a solid racer who earned a victory in the 1998 Indianapolis 500 in the car that Brown later bought.

“He was one of my heroes, and they say don’t get to know your hero…”

Brown and Cheever had a falling out, and Brown sold Cheever’s car soon after, despite its value and place in history.

“We’ve since kissed and made up,” Brown says. “But at the time I looked at the car, and the stuff I collect, I want to have the driver have been one of my heroes, and I drive

Formula One is a massive sport, a lot of it’s managed right and a lot of it’s not managed right

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The lifestyle you deserve from the premier name in home automation The feeling you get from luxury can’t be measured.

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Enjoy the things that matter most in your life with Crestron. crestron.com/homeautomation

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All brand names, product names, and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Certain trademarks, registered trademarks, and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Crestron disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Crestron is not responsible for errors in typography or photography. ©2015 Crestron Electronics, Inc. AD2015_11

my cars and you wouldn’t drive this one because it’s an oval car. So it was a combination of I didn’t think the car was a nice-looking car, Eddie and I had a punch up, and then I can’t drive it so it was like, ‘Hey, you know what? Get it out of here.’ I probably regret selling it because Indy 500 winners, there’s not many of those. I think the guy who bought it got a good deal.”

Any other regretted sales?

“Well… You always regret selling something that then goes up in price. My [Niki] Lauda Ferrari, I didn’t fit in it so I sold that. I did well on it, but I think it’s worth even more today than what I sold it for. But you know, you can’t do that. Once you make a profit you can’t go, ‘Well if I’d kept that, kept that, kept that… You’d drive yourself crazy.”

For collectors who are in it just for the money, “that’s fine,” says Brown. “They’re just in the business of flipping cars. I think anyone who’s in the car business probably has a love for the car even if they flip them, but they don’t fall in love with any one because they’ll sell that one tomorrow and get a new one. I don’t do it for that, none of these cars are for sale. Whenever I’ve sold a car there’s been a specific reason, it was either I had a punch up or I didn’t fit in the car or I was upgrading to a different type of car.

“The historic cars, I enjoy those more than today’s race cars for sure. But I think everyone’s got their childhood memories. Mine, I remember watching all those cars growing

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up. And now to think I own then and drive them… Richard will say I’ve always collected the small cars, and now I’ve got the big versions, and that’s true and it’s incredible.”

He says he’d like to get to Le Mans in the LMP2 division (his team is currently readying two LMP3 cars), which he’s aiming to do by 2018. And there’s his family, including his two sons, and there are likely goals there. But with so much accomplished, it’s tough to imagine what Brown has yet to achieve beyond a potential leadership role in F1 or his personal racing goals. For his part, the driver, businessman and collector doesn’t seem overly bothered by thoughts of the future.

“I’ve got my racing, I sit on the board of Cosworth [high-performance engineering], I’m running CSM and JMI… I just want to be in racing and around cars the rest of my life. And so whether that’s F1 or my [racing] team gets bigger or I keep doing what I’m doing, I don’t have a specific kind of ‘I want to do this next,’ but I’ll always be doing something. I’m definitely not the retirement type, and I want to keep playing with my cars.”

I’ll always be doing something; I’m definitely not the retirement type, and I want to keep playing with my cars

M600 M600

The Ownership Advantage

Your schedule is your own.

piper.com | 1.772.299.2403 Š 2015 Piper Aircraft, Inc.

P

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Offering the best of both worlds, Stemme motor gliders leave you independently in control of your flight experience

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any aviation enthusiasts have long

considered gliders to offer the purest form of flight, an experience closer to what the birds enjoy than to that of a conventional aircraft.

Gliders can be nearly silent as well as they soar across valleys and mountain faces, leaving pilots and passengers to savor the sensation of being aloft with only the sound of the wind outside, and that can seem nonexistent at times. But for all of their attributes, most gliders cannot exist alone—they need a conventional aircraft to tow them into the sky—and this dependency makes them seem incomplete somehow, along with presenting a few potentially unpleasant variables, such as the cost and availability of tow planes. However, there is a company making gliders that are as independent in operation as they are in spirit: Stemme. The Strausberg, Germany-based firm has been making motor gliders since it was founded in 1984, and its aircraft are nothing short of phenomenal, not least because they can take off by themselves.

Luxury aircraft built to exacting standards, Stemme’s motor gliders are supreme examples of fine German craftsmanship. Moreover, they are technological wonders at the cutting edge of advancements in aviation electronics, instrumentation and engineering. Motor gliders occupy their own place within aviation anyway, marrying the benefits and thrills of engine-powered aircraft with the elegant efficiency and performance satisfaction of pure sailplanes.

Rather than compromising the attributes of either to achieve a workable hybrid, Stemme’s aircraft actually seem to enhance the benefits of both the powered and non-powered categories, resulting in a remarkable achievement which stands—or rather which flies— alone. Stemme pilots don’t need to do so, of course, as a passenger is accommodated in several of the company’s aircraft, including the new S12 Twin Voyager. Like all of Stemme’s motor gliders, the S12 should come as a revelation to anyone who’s ever gazed skyward and considered flying. Among the numerous benefits of gliders is the reasonable level of flight education needed prior to operation. While training is required, Stemme motor gliders don’t require as much instruction as is necessary to fly typical engine-powered aircraft, and don’t even require a medical certificate for operation (though, obviously, a pilot should always check with his or her health care provider before considering taking to the skies). Assuming a person is willing and able, all that’s needed to fly a Stemme legally is a private pilot’s license with a glider rating, bringing dreams of being among the clouds decidedly within reach for many.

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I T

WO R KS

As the name states, gliders operate on the principle of gliding through the air rather than on powering through it, relying on their substantial wingspans (relative to engine-powered aircraft), lithe design and usually low weights to stay in the air for long periods of time, even as they float to the ground.

A key measurement for a glider (and for any aircraft) is its glide ratio, the distance it travels forward relative to its descent. As an example, Stemme’s new S12 has a glide ratio of 1:53, which means that for every 100 meters it descends it can travel a distance of 5,300 meters. To put that in perspective, a commercial jetliner might have a glide ratio closer to 1:17, owing to its different purpose, which necessitates added weight and a completely different design. Of course gliders do not only descend—they climb as well, using natural patterns of moving air to gain altitude when necessary in much the same way birds do. These patterns take three major forms: thermals, ridge lift and wave lift. When the sun heats the earth the newly warmed air close the ground rises, especially in areas where heat is more concentrated, like in large rocky areas of darkly colored earth and expansive parking lots. Usually rising in large columns of air, thermals provide elevators of sorts to glider pilots, who can enter a thermal, ride it to the desired altitude and then exit to continue on their way. Likewise, they can ride air currents pushing up mountain ridge lines (ridge lift) or that spilling over the leeward side of mountains (wave lift) to gain altitude, allowing gliders to stay in the air almost indefinitely as long as conditions are conducive to flight.

Sometimes, however, when a pilot might want to travel a great distance from one point to another, when conditions aren’t ideal or just because a pilot might want to migrate from one area to another and not risk running out of lift opportunities, gliders can be quite limiting. Enter Stemme and their motor gliders. All of Stemme’s aircraft are self-launching, so they do not require being towed to altitude by a more conventional aircraft: they take off by themselves from the runway using landing gear that retracts into the fuselage once in flight. And once airborne, a Stemme’s exceptional performance as a glider is enhanced by the fact that, whenever he or she chooses, the pilot

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can engage an engine. The transition compels a unique design to go into effect, with Stemme’s sliding nosecone moving forward and a propeller unfolding, deploying in just seconds. The Stemme-Retrac foldable and variable pitch propeller competely disappears into its dome, and takes only five seconds to deploy as the glider shifts into engine mode. Once deployed, the Rotax 914 F2/S1 Turbo engine (which sits behind the cockpit) drives the propeller via a clutch assembly and carbon fiber driveshaft, allowing the S12 to cruise at 140 knots per hour, making it a true touring aircraft, one that is certified by the FAA and which allows for hours and hours of flying with no fuel expenditure. There’s even a separate baggage compartment in the fuselage, which expands travel opportunities greatly.

As mentioned before, in the case of Stemme’s S12 and S10, a passenger/copilot can enjoy the ride as well, sitting alongside the pilot under a glorious one-piece canopy that offers tremendous panoramic views of the sky and of the world outside.

In terms of amenities and comforts, the leather seats couldn’t be better or more finished, and the premium electronics (including electric trim and dis-connectable autopilot) are cutting-edge.

In addition to offering superlative aircraft, Stemme supports with a network of top service centers, maintenance training and catalog of replacement and wear parts, meaning that customers will always have a resource in Stemme, years after their initial purchase. With a global presence and numerous opportunities for purchasing and experiencing Stemme aircraft, the company offers one of the most compelling products in flight. If you’ve ever watched the birds in the sky and wondered, “what if?” but

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were dissuaded by the high cost and long hours involved in learning to fly—or if you’re familiar with flight but looking for something new and exceptional—Stemme has the answer. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be flying, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t have the best of both worlds when it comes to enjoying the sky.

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Major Ambitions Some golf courses evolve into tournament venues over many decades, whereas others come ready-made.

Tony Dear investigates what it takes to build a golf course fit for world-class competition

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im Justice breaks from our telephone interview for a moment and puts his cell phone down, but I can still hear him order a ham sandwich and Diet Coke.

He calls the deli employee by her first name and pays for his lunch like anybody else would, even though this billionaire coal and agriculture magnate—who serves as CEO for over 40 companies—owns this particular deli and, indeed, the magnificent hotel in which it stands.

Justice saved the fabled Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, from bankruptcy in May 2009, and since then he has pumped over $250 million into some major renovations, additions, and further acquisitions aimed at benefitting Greenbrier homeowners, members and guests alike. Justice says a large part of his success is due to his being a natural people person, and his friendly banter

with the lady at the delicatessen, as well as his considerable philanthropic activity, certainly betray his softer side. But you don’t have a net worth of over $1.5 billion without knowing how to handle yourself in the boardroom.

A bear of a man at 6’7” and 350lbs, Justice carries a reputation as an astute businessman who knows how to get what he wants. And right now he wants the U.S. Open.

Justice—the Greenbrier East High School girls and boys basketball coach and the man currently in the running for West Virginia governor—returns to our conversation and elaborates on the audacious plan he unveiled in June to hire Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and The Greenbrier’s Pro Emeritus Lee Trevino to design a course on a 1,100-acre plot in the Allegheny Mountains, a course he hopes will someday host the Mountain State’s first-ever

major championship. Other than for the U.S. Open, the new course is intended to serve the resort’s private, residential community, The Greenbrier Sporting Club, and will be the centerpiece of the Oakhurst planned neighborhood and real estate development.

“I want the course to showcase the beauty of the area,” says Justice, “but at the same time, I have made it clear I want to bring the U.S. Open here. I want the designers’ footprints all over the course. I don’t want Palmer to design a few holes, Nicklaus to design a few holes, and so on.

I want all of them to contribute to every hole.”

Thad Layton, Palmer’s senior course designer, describes the site as a steep ridge-top approximately four miles long, running from north to south. “The very top of the ridge could be best classified as meadow,” Layton adds. “Large

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hardwood trees bracket the meadows and descend the steep slopes on each side of the ridge. The far north end of the property is more gently-contoured.”

The course will overlook the historic nine-hole Oakhurst Links—thought to be the first golf club established in the United States—and which Justice purchased in 2012.

Because it sits at almost 3,000 feet above sea level, the man in charge has directed his illustrious design team to build a course in excess of 8,000 yards.

He hopes he has a story that is just too good for the USGA to ignore. “I am very respectful of the USGA and its process for choosing U.S. Open venues,” says Justice. “But I believe we have a very convincing case. We have four U.S. Open champions designing the course, and it’s virtually on the same site as one of the first courses in the United States, if not the first. I can’t think why the USGA would turn us down.”

The routing is devised and the famous four were on-site in October to break ground, see the centerlines cut and to approve the final plans. Justice says the next step is to contact USGA Executive Director Mike Davis. “We’ve spoken before,” he says, “but this time I’ll make a formal request.”

Layton offers some insight into the design theory.

“Ideally, the course will have two reachable par-5s, one unreachable, and one of medium length,” he says. “There would be two drivable par-4s playing in different directions, while the other par-4s would be a mixed bag of lengths, directions and elevations to ensure different shot shapes and a variety of clubs are used for approach shots. The par-3s should also have similar variety.”

Layton stresses, however, that while this configuration would work best, the realities of the site will trump any formula. “The topography drives the routing, the par, and the respective yardages,” he says.

Besides the design of the actual holes, consideration will, of course, have to be made for infrastructure, real estate and all the “extras” venues of large-scale golf tournaments require. “Giving 10-15 acres of the site over to concession areas and a corporate village is a good rule of thumb,” says Layton. “And you have to plan for these areas well before construction begins. The quality of viewing from the grandstands and corporate tents is paramount.”

Something else that needs to be addressed is how people are going to get to The Greenbrier, should it be awarded the U.S. Open. Hosting a PGA TOUR event—the Greenbrier Classic—is one thing; accommodating the U.S. Open masses is quite another. “We certainly need to improve our transportation links,” Justice admits. At present there is a twice-daily Silver Airways flight from Lewisburg, about 10 miles west of The Greenbrier, to Washington Dulles, but that’s really about it. “I’m working on having direct flights to Dallas, Atlanta and New York added,” says Justice. “And though the project has been put on hold for a while, I’m still hoping to resurrect my plan to create an Orient Expressstyle rail link between The Greenbrier, D.C. and New York.”

The Greenbrier train station, currently served by Amtrak, is already in place, but Justice’s plan for his own train, with 15 luxury parlor cars featuring décor matching the Dorothy Draper interiors at the resort, has proved tough to execute.

“We have four U.S. Open champions designing the course. I can’t think why the USGA would turn us down”

(L to R) Lee Trevino, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Arnold Palmer at The Greenbrier (above), and Jim Justice (right), who hopes to bring the U.S. Open to West Virginia for the first time

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Chambers Bay, host of the 2015 U.S. Open—during which the views looked better than the greens

Recent history

The Greenbrier’s road to the U.S. Open could be similar to that travelled by Pierce County in Washington State, which hosted this year’s U.S. Open at the municipally-owned Chambers Bay Golf Club near Tacoma. “Been there, done that,” says John Ladenburg, the former county executive whose idea it was to turn part of a 900-acre sand and gravel mine into a championship golf course fit for a U.S. Open.

The original plan, says Ladenburg, had not been quite as ambitious as it would become after consulting with local golf industry executives and administrators. “I quickly began to realize the potential of what we had,” says Ladenburg, who put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) from course architects in 2002. After receiving a staggering 56 responses, many from the world’s most renowned designers, Ladenburg’s notion of a simple public course soon morphed into one capable of hosting a major championship.

“Once I had decided to aim for the ultimate prize, we went all out,” says Ladenburg. “I chose Robert Trent Jones, Jr. to design the course, and I told him to do whatever it took to build a U.S. Open venue. I gave him whatever he needed.”

Ladenburg had plenty to give. Not only was the budget fairly stout, the land on which Jones got to build would be free of real estate, and full of top-quality sand —a remnant of the site’s mining operation. “We had a lot of space, nearly 300 acres,” says Jones. “When you have

so much room, building a course that not only challenges the best but also provides an enjoyable round for public golfers isn’t all that difficult. It allows you to give the holes width, so everyone can find the fairway from the tee. Of course, it gets a little tougher the closer you get to the hole, and to really test the elite you simply firm up the greens, grow a little rough and hide a few pins. And we contoured the fairways where the pros land their tee shots. There were a lot of trap doors for players not demonstrating sound strategy.”

As for the public areas, Jones says they had to be part of the design from day one. “They can’t just be an afterthought,” he says. “If you’re building a course to host a big event you obviously have to consider concession areas, corporate villages, parking and all the rest of it from the start. You have to fit them into the overall design, but do it in such a way as to not compromise the design of any of the holes.”

A perceived lack of spectator viewing areas at Chambers Bay came in for some harsh criticism, although Jones insists he and his team were ever conscious of the ticket-buying public. “We created acres of faux dunes to give spectators a good view of the golf,” he says. “And we made the tops of those dunes fairly flat in order to facilitate spectator movement.”

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The 17th at TPC Sawgrass (above), and the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island (below)—completed in the nick of time for the 1991 Ryder Cup

Cast in Dye

The man who built the first viewing areas into golf courses “We dug a lot of ponds and ditches, then piled up the soil to for big-time tournaments was Pete Dye, who was charged create spectator mounding,” says Dye. “And of course we by then-PGA TOUR Commissioner Deane Beman to build had to incorporate a lot of public areas. I don’t recall the a stadium effect around the closing holes at TPC Sawgrass exact acreage, but I do know it was part of the plan from in Florida, home of The Players Championship. The first the start.” of 36 TPC facilities in the USA, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, Chambers and Colombia, Sawgrass was, Dye recalls, nothing but a Bay, and the new course at The Greenbrier are just three 415-acre swamp. examples of courses that have been, or will be, developed “It was just a mess,” the 89-year-old design legend specifically for grand occasions. There are plenty of others— says. “It took a lot of work to clear, and we had to dig a the K Club in Ireland designed by Palmer, Celtic Manor in canal to drain the water. Once it was finished, there was a nine-foot drop in the water level, and all we had to do was excavate the dirt and pile it up at the side of 17 and around the green at 18 to create the stadiums.

“There was a load of great sand beneath all the muck, so we just had to flip-flop it,” he adds. “We stockpiled the muck and then put five or six feet of sand and turf on top.”

Somewhere else Dye had to be creative to ensure a good spectator experience was the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, site of the 1991 Ryder Cup and 2012 PGA Championship. A narrow and mostly flat site, Kiawah was developed by Landmark Land Company with which the PGA of America had an agreement.

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“These are the greatest names in golf. Arnold won his first check here at The Greenbrier. It’s very compelling”

Wales, Le Golf National near Paris, Erin Hills in Wisconsin, every new-built TPC venue, and of course Gil Hanse’s Olympic Course in Rio, which will welcome 120 of the world’s best players next August.

The purpose-built course needs to tick a number of boxes to be successful. First and foremost, if it’s staging a Ryder Cup, major championship, or the Olympic Games, it needs to be a great test of golf. Second, it probably helps to have a big name behind it (Hanse clearly does not have Palmer’s cachet or global standing, but he is extremely well respected in the industry). Third, there needs to be plenty of space for corporate, concession and merchandising areas. Fourth, paying spectators need to have an excellent view of the action. And lastly, you must ensure players and spectators have somewhere to stay nearby and can travel to the venue without difficulty.

Once all that is in place, a certain amount of what some people call “petitioning” is probably in order, nowhere more so than in Europe where the competition to host a Ryder Cup invokes national pride as well as individual drive.

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The 2010 Ryder Cup Course at Celtic Manor (above) and the Palmer Course at the K Club in Ireland (below), stage for the 2006 Ryder Cup

Back home in West Virginia, Justice the politician won’t be shy about promoting his state and course when he goes in search of the U.S. Open, but he hopes Palmer’s clout, and that of his fellow legends, will carry the day. “These are the greatest names in golf,” he says. “They have 40 major wins between them. Arnold won his first check as a professional here at The Greenbrier. It’s very compelling.”

And whether Justice carries the day or not, as interested spectators we can only applaud the addition of more world class golf facilities.

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TPC S I G N AT U R E HOLES TPC properties open a whole world of fantastic lifestyle possibilities for their members and guests, and chief among them is good golf.

With courses and clubs that are among the best anywhere, there are sites to fit every personal taste and style of play. Here, we look at just a few signature holes from the TPC landscape. As it turns out, in the TPC Network inspiration is everywhere.

TPC SNOQUALMIE RIDGE

TPC BOSTON

TPC RIVER HIGHLANDS

TPC TWIN CITIES

TPC JASNA POLANA TPC DEERE RUN

TPC MICHIGAN

TPC POTOMAC

TPC STONEBRAE TPC SUMMERLIN TPC HARDING PARK TPC VALENCIA TPC STADIUM COURSE AT PGA WEST

TPC LAS VEGAS TPC SCOTTSDALE

THE OLD WHITE TPC AT THE GREENBRIER

TPC RIVER’S BEND

TPC WAKEFIELD PLANTATION TPC PIPER GLEN

TPC SOUTHWIND

TPC MYRTLE BEACH

TPC CRAIG RANCH TPC SUGARLOAF TPC FOUR SEASONS TPC SAN ANTONIO

TPC SAWGRASS

TPC LOUISIANA

TPC TAMPA BAY TPC PRESTANCIA

TPC EAGLE TRACE

TPC TREVISO BAY

RESORT/DAILY FEE PROPERTIES PRIVATE CLUBS

TPC CARTAGENA AT KARIBANA

CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA

TPC AT BAHA MAR

NASSAU, THE BAHAMAS

TPC DORADO BEACH

DORADO, PUERTO RICO

TPC Cartagena HOLE 17 Part of an exciting finish to players’ rounds, the beautiful 17th hole at TPC Cartagena measures only 140 yards; however, a stiff breeze and stunning beach come into play on the right, making this short par-3 quite a test. Professionals and amateurs alike will be happy with a look at birdie, no matter the distance, for those players who miss the green will be faced with a complicated up-and-down for par, as deep bunkers and collection areas guard the putting surface.

TPC Myrtle Beach HOLE 17 Designed by acclaimed architect Tom Fazio, TPC Myrtle Beach leads players through towering pines, red oaks and the picturesque marshes of the Lowcountry, and the stunning 17th hole treats golfers to all three. A beautiful 193-yard, par-3, the 17th hole features a large putting surface surrounded by water on three sides, forcing players to place a premium on a well-struck approach shot to the left hand portion of the green.

TPC Southwind HOLE 7 One of the longest par-4s on the course, the 482-yard 7th hole at TPC Southwind is a test from start to finish. Off the tee, players are faced with avoiding a large fairway bunker on the left while a crop of small trees penalize tee shots that drift off the fairway to the right. A large green with abundant spectator mounds for the patrons of the FedEx St. Jude Classic await players’ approach shots, making par here feel like birdie.

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gift guide

Full Speed Forget taking it easy: the following items are geared for those who begin each day at pole position

Rolex Daytona

Vintage Auto Posters

A legendary beach in Florida synonymous with speed—and an iconic chronograph that was born to race. Equipped with a tachymetric scale on the bezel to measure speed, it enables precision timing to one eighth of a second. Powered by calibre 4130, Rolex’s high-performance mechanical chronograph movement, this is a watch for those who run at the front.  rolex.com

Since 1980, Everett Anton Singer has been supplying international collectors with the most diverse and highest quality selection of authentic vintage automotive posters. Whether building a collection or seeking a single decorative piece, the most discerning buyers have sought his expertise and personal service. The vast inventory begins in the early 1900s and runs primarily through the 1960s, featuring marque, event, and product advertising. Each poster is a guaranteed original and is professionally mounted on archival linen.  VintageAutoPosters.com

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Glenmorangie 1970s Collection Glenmorangie has remained our publisher’s favorite single malt for many years but even his extensive cabinet does not reach back this far, with the famous distiller re-bottling five of its most treasured vintages from the 1970s.

Released as a genuine limited edition collection—a total of 10 sets have been produced—this seminal range comes in a handmade, bespoke case engineered

by Holland’s leading designer Wouter Scheublin. At $50,000 for the collection, buyers might be pleased to know the case comes with a lock.  glenmorangie.com

Persol

Forzieri

Steve McQueen wore the 714 in the movie The Thomas Crown Affair and they have remained among the most iconic sunglasses ever since. Designed by Persol, timeless style comes built-in but they are also constructed with comfort and convenience in mind and they are built to last.  persol.com

Created for those who love to drive, let them grasp the wheel in style with these Italian-made Men’s Driving Gloves. The Gloves are crafted from supple leather, featuring a half-finger design with classic cotton-woven mesh and a button strap. The gloves are durable, functional and aesthetically fine-tuned.  forzieri.com

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gift guide

Dunhill Tradition Hunters Flask

Harrys of London

In 1893, aged 21 and already a skilled leather craftsman, Alfred Dunhill inherited his father’s equestrian saddle and harness manufacturing business. With remarkable vision and entrepreneurial flair he transformed the business for the age of the car and reached around the globe, supplying exquisite leather and metal accessories as well as driving apparel and protective clothing. This key ring harks back to those roots while a traditional Dunhill leather flask—with four drinking cups—is perfect for any trip.  dunhill.com

From the world of London luxury comes Harry’s Signature Jet Moc, a shoe created to make travelling less complicated and more comfortable. Shaped with elegance and stitched with durability, whether onboard a plane or travelling on the road, Jet Moc 5 offers the comfort of a normal shoe alongside the flexibility of a slipper; perfect for those constantly on the move.  harrysoflondon.com

Ettinger weekend bag Just as the bucolic English countryside provides a distinctive weekend destination, this typical English bag makes the perfect weekend companion. Constructed with a sturdy cotton drill and trimmed in a wonderful waxy hide, this travel bag has a single internal compartment big enough to hold several sets of clothes and the indispensable woolly jumper for those colder English nights. It features two slip pockets inside to hold smaller items like passports and tickets.  ettinger.co.uk

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Maximum Extraction Juicer The KitchenAid® Maximum Extraction Juicer provides more juice from less preparation, featuring a two-stage blade and auger system and wide chute. This juicer comes with three pulp speeds for low pulp, high pulp and sauces and it is perfect for hard, soft or leafy fruits and vegetables. It is a domestic blessing and as with all KitchenAid products, it instantly adds sleek professionalism to any kitchen top.  kitchenaid.com

Jura J95 If you prize true bean-to-cup coffee but won’t compromise on kitchen-top style then the new Swiss-made JURA J95 automatic coffee center offers that perfect marriage of machine design, aesthetics and authentic taste. High-tech in every sense, the hand-finished carbon front is a real style statement, while the technology inside effortlessly impresses with its quality, performance and ease of use.  jura.com

Carl Hansen With its soft, inviting shapes and floating armrests, designer Frits Henningsen’s Signature Chair is one of his lightest creations, reflecting a philosophy that matured towards simplicity and precision. Achieving both comfort and elegance through the use of graceful, curved lines, the chair put the finishing touch on Frits Henningsen’s life’s work although only 20 were originally produced. Through access to Frits Henningsen’s archives and in collaboration with the designer’s family, the Signature Chair is being revived. It is available with a solid oak or walnut frame and in various finishes, with leather or fabric upholstery.  carlhansen.com

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gift guide

Best Made Axes Pick one up and the immutable law of the axe kicks in; you are kindred with every man through time who has ever swung blade on wood. Out of the Big Apple comes the American Felling Axe

by Best Made Company. Four pounds in weight and drop forged from an American-made 5160 alloy, the axe head is not just an iconic American design but its slim profile makes for improved cutting and chip throwing. The handle is a straight-grain, premium hickory that originates in Appalachia and is shaped to provide maximum efficiency, comfort, and safety.  bestmadeco.com

Cowboy Cauldron Cowboy Cauldron Company makes the world’s most striking, versatile and durable fire pits & grills. A stunning architectural feature, each Cowboy Cauldron fire pit is hand made in the USA, giving those who insist upon authentic craftsmanship the perfect combination of timeless quality and rugged sophistication.  cowboycauldron.com

Stonehouse imagery This summer past, the [British] Open returned to the ‘Home of Golf’, St Andrews and its Old Course. Stonehouse captured all the excitement with five fantastic new images of the world’s oldest links. Photographer Dan Murphy returned from Scotland with these stunning pictures, one of which—Number 17—has been recognized by St Andrews in honor of the Open’s return.

Select yours and if you have been fortunate enough to play the Old Course or any of the other hundreds of leading courses shot by Stonehouse, you can now personalize your picture with names, dates and scores. Make sure your most treasured and vivid golfing memories are preserved with Stonehouse.  stonehousegolf.com

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Bobby Jones Joey D The more you practice the better you get, right? Well not necessarily, because many fitness routines can simply repeat and then reinforce bad habits. Awareness, purpose, and precision are absolute musts for a truly fulfilling golf workout program.

Coach Joey D promises players at all levels will experience improved consistency, mobility, power and distance with his pro-proven golf workout programs. Learn about real stories from real players and then follow suit.  joeydgolf.com

Callaway The Great Big Bertha driver is back and Callaway promises it is better than ever. An optimized chassis has improved aerodynamics which should result in faster clubhead speed, while the thinnest Big Bertha clubface yet enhances ball speed for greater driving distance. Fully adjustable, the Big Bertha can be customized to suit individual swing dynamics to improve consistency of strike and dispersion control.  callawaygolf.com

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There is nothing quite like the luxury, textured feel of Merino wool. For golfers, Merino is practical too in that it provides warmth, it is naturally moisture-wicking and carries no restrictive weight to impede movement or comfort. From Bobby Jones comes a colorful line of Merino Quarter Zip and V Neck Sweaters with marbled zipper pull and classic knit stripes inside a convertible collar. Made 100% from extra fine merino wool, the sweaters hand wash or dry clean.  bobbyjones.com

SUBSCRIBE TO TPC Signature magazine is available on a complimentary basis to the members, players and guests of all the courses in the TPC Network.

Now the magazine is also available for subscription to all TPC fans and golfers with a taste for fine living. If you would like to subscribe, or are a member or guest of a TPC Network course and would like to gift a subscription to a friend, then simply tear out and fill in one of the below forms.

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Pure Sound T

here’s a moment in the recording, just before the music starts, when Paul McCartney adjusts himself in his chair and you can hear the slight creak of the acoustic guitar in his hands. He makes a comment about a technical issue, the recording engineer assures him everything is all right, and so McCartney begins to play. This particular recording of Mother Nature’s Son is all Paul, just him and his guitar, and it sounds like an early track. The recording is special because it captures, in tremendous detail, a specific moment when a luminary artist is at work in the studio. It is captivating, engaging and wonderfully intimate. It’s as if McCartney is right there in front of you, and the engineer is sitting just behind a pane of glass to the side. With your eyes closed it’s easy to imagine mic stands and chairs set up around the room as well.

There’s just the music and the listener, and nothing between them. And that’s exactly how John Bowers wanted it.

“The best loudspeaker isn’t the one that gives the most, it’s the one that loses the least,” Bowers is quoted as saying, and his ethos is obvious in the newly restructured 800 Series Diamond speakers from Bowers & Wilkins, the audio firm he founded in 1966. It was a set of the top-ofrange 800s that delivered The Beatles recording I heard, though the speakers themselves were so transparent that “channeled the recording” might be a better way to put it: it’s as if the music simply appeared in the room, rather than emanating from a particular device or even direction (though of course the audio did indeed come through the

We’re not coloring the sound, we’re not shaping it; you don’t want to notice the loudspeakers

Bowers & Wilkins new 800 Series Diamond is there, but you won’t hear it—you’ll only hear the music

loudspeakers). In terms of loss, I’d be hard pressed to know what I wasn’t hearing. Listening to the McCartney track, an Oscar Peterson recording and a few other songs, I’ve never heard so much of the music, the musicians breathing behind the tracks, the subtleties and the details that establish the human-ness of the music being played. As for how this is possible, B&W product manager Adam Kerr told me that it took an awful lot of engineering, money and time to make the updated 800 series speakers “disappear,” in a matter of speaking, and so it’s no surprise that they don’t share a price tag with the plastic bookend noise boxes you had in college.

Perhaps ironically, it costs more to acquire a product you won’t notice—but that’s rather the point.

“We’re not coloring the sound, we’re not shaping it,” Kerr said. “You don’t want to notice the loudspeakers.”

Indeed, you’re more apt to stare at the new 800 Series Diamond when they’re not engaged, so striking are they in appearance. They’re actually an update to a series that has been around since 1979, and while the latest manifestation carries the spirit of the original in addition to the “800” designation, it’s fair to say they’re a whole new animal.

The most obvious update is the cabinet. The last 800s featured a rounded back and flat front, and it’s the opposite in the new 800 Series Diamond, which features a beautifully curved front. Deliberately, the cones are positioned with the curve of the cabinet falling away just off their edges. The idea was to move any unnecessary resonant surface away from the sound’s point of origin, basically, because sound travels along a surface before it releases, and the length and shape of this travel can affect the quality of the sound that meets your ears. To illustrate this point, Kerr spoke to me while placing his hands, palms out, against either side of his mouth, then moved his hands away. With his hands framing his mouth, his voice sounded fine, but when he moved his hands away the sound of his voice was richer, fuller and more natural. It’s a rudimentary illustration, but the principle is the same with the new 800 Series Diamond’s curved front: no flat surface extending from the cones

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If you haven’t heard the music through the new 800 Series, then you haven’t really heard the music means the sound goes directly from the speaker into the air and to your ears.

When it comes to the cones themselves, B&W abandoned kevlar as the choice material for the midrange speaker cones and instead switched to a proprietary composite they call “Continuum,” which the company believes to be more transparent in nature. Likewise, bass is handled with cones that vary in thickness across their surface, being ultra-stiff where needed and less so when that’s preferable, to yield more accurate low end.

At every stage of the speaker’s construction every detail has been seen to, every variable that could color the sound has been neutralized as much as possible. From the cabinets themselves—very heavy and stiff, made of thin wood sheets stacked in alternating grain patterns (for maximum strength), bonded and then folded, cut and sanded—to the interior bracing, which is substantial and rock-solid and which includes an aluminum spine at the back, to the drivers and electronic components, nearly every bit of which is made in the Worthing factory that Bowers established so many years ago, the new 800 Series Diamond are superb. As for the “Diamond” moniker, it’s in reference to the tweeter, which is made of diamond dust that’s been bonded into a dome of sorts. The diamond tweeters are incredibly stiff and yield the highest performance imaginable, but they’re fragile to the point where they’re transported around the

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factory lab in individual cases. Once they’re mounted (in a unit machined from a single block of aluminum), a steel grill is precisely put in place to ensure their safety.

Bowers & Wilkins is one of the best companies of its kind in the world. B&W speakers have been the speakers of choice at Abbey Road Studios and for many top music producers. Their headphones and audio components have reinvented consumer listening experiences, their flagship Nautilus speaker is a revelation in both sound and design, and Bowers & Wilkins is now the speaker of choice for BMW, which will feature B&W speakers in the new 7-Series.

As for the company’s latest product update, the list of innovations and technologies at play in the new 800 Series Diamond goes on for pages, and the incredible attention to detail and quality workmanship on display in the clean and well-organized Worthing factory is inspiring, to say the least (nine coats of paint are applied to each black 800 Series Diamond speaker before it’s hand polished, to give but one example). All of it, all of the work and engineering and detailed efforts of so many people at Bowers & Wilkins is for one purpose: to make their speaker disappear the instant the music begins. It’s no exaggeration to offer that if you’ve never heard your music collection through the new 800 Series Diamond, then you haven’t really heard your music collection. We’ll speak for ourselves, but we’re giddy at the thought of the rediscoveries that await.

REVIVAL OF THE F ITTEST

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M

ost mothers would shudder at the thought of their son motor racing, but the Walkers were not like most families. Rob Walker, an heir to the Johnnie Walker whisky dynasty, was 10 years old in 1927 when he persuaded his widowed mother Mary to buy him his first car, a Bullnose Morris. At least the Walkers had a driveway at home in Rickmansworth, northwest of London, that gave the aspiring speedster ample room to indulge his passion.

“We had a long drive at home of a mile or so, and my mother gave me the old Bullnose Morris for Christmas to keep me quiet,” said the late Rob Walker in a television interview in the 1980s. “From that moment on, my life was dedicated to trying to break my record on the one-mile drive.”

He had a pit manager too, in the form of the family’s “second chauffeur,” whose responsibilities largely revolved around teaching Walker how to drive and maintain cars, and to try and keep the spirited boy from doing himself a mischief.

In 1939, Rob Walker’s Delahaye 135s was crowned the fastest racing car in Great Britain. A descendent of the Johnnie Walker whisky family, Walker raced his beloved Delahaye at Le Mans and today, 76 years later, Johnnie Walker has revived the roar of this historic car

As Walker grew up, so the cars became faster, and his studies at Cambridge University—where students are not permitted to have cars—were of secondary importance to a flourishing amateur racing career. Walker’s prorities were cemented once he had purchased—on a whim—what would become recognized as Britain’s fastest racing car, a 1936 Delahaye 135s in French racing blue.

“I was walking down the road when I saw through a window the most beautiful Delahaye I had ever seen,” Walker recalls of his fateful stroll down London’s Park Lane.

“This was the Competition Type-35. At the time the car held the lap record in the TT and it had lapped Brooklands at 119 mph, which was not bad. Within hours I owned the car [on finance]. Of course my mother knew nothing about this, and the next thing, I had entered it into Brooklands. In my first race I was winning until the last corner and then I went and spun the thing. I did win in it later that year and I would take it to Le Mans.”

On his passport, Walker entered his occupation as “Gentleman.” A friend once described him as “selfunemployed.” Self-unemployed Walker may have been, but idle he was not.

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FEELING THE HEAT: LE MANS The Le Mans 24-Hour race, or the Grand Prix d’Endurance as the French race was known in the 1930s, is the world’s original 24-hour motor race, having begun in 1923. While popular Grand Prix racing tested the speed, agility and daring of cars and drivers, Le Mans added endurance to the challenge.

Walker’s formidable Delahaye was ideal for the test of motoring stamina posed by Le Mans. The French-made, 3.6-litre, six cylinder Delahaye was built not just for exceptional speed, but it was built to last. Appropriately, the “s” stands for Speciale, and TV presenter Jay Leno, who has assembled one of the world’s most extensive vintage car collections, owns a 1935 Delahaye 135s that is almost identical to Walker’s model that raced at Le Mans.

“It is essentially built with a truck engine,” says Leno in a Jay Leno’s Garage recording. “Unlike a Bugatti it is not particularly sophisticated… but it is robust and sturdy and it was meant to run reliably. It’s a good old workhorse.”

Leno’s description is truthful yet does the 135s a disservice. Delahaye brought to racing a heritage of engineering heavy-duty truck engines, but the 135s was more thoroughbred than workhorse; beauty in relative simplicity under the hood, and with the right driver at the wheel it could leave the more “sophisticated” Bugattis choking on its dust.

Walker proved it when his Delahaye—licence plate DUV 870—won the Fastest Road Car Challenge at Brooklands’ annual Whitsun Meeting in May 1939. Brooklands, in the

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Racing at Brooklands became one of the UK’s most popular sporting attractions between the World Wars, here in 1931 (top left); Rob Walker inspects a Cooper car in 1959 (above), and the Delahaye 135s in pre-war action (left)

town of Weybridge, to London’s southwest, was the home of British motor racing, and over two races in one day the Delahaye won by 10.4 seconds and with a fastest lap speed average of 73.13mph, while on the straights the Delahaye comfortably outstripped 110mph. An Alfa Romeo had started faster at Brooklands, but emphasizing the reliability of the Delahaye, the Alfa’s gearbox failed and it did not finish.

Weeks after the Brooklands Challenge, Walker and fellow amateur Ian Connell headed across the English Channel to Le Mans, to compete in what would be the final Le Mans race before the outbreak of the Second World World War. Within the oil-stained pit lanes of European racetracks in the 1930s, racing helmets were the sole preserve of professional drivers, but as was the case in golf, the pros competed directly with amateurs—the generally wealthy, aristocratic thrill-seekers like Walker who pioneered motor racing. Amateurs would race spoke by spoke alongside this

emerging breed of pro drivers with nothing more than a pair of goggles around their head. Some of them would wear rope-soled shoes too, but more on that in a moment.

The Delahaye did not win at Le Mans, but it finished eighth overall and third in its category, after a heroic effort

by Walker and Connell. Today in the 24-Hour at Le Mans, teams of at least three drivers must be assigned to each car, but there were precious few rules or precautions in 1939, and Walker and Connell, free of helmets and dressed in pin-stripe suits, split the driving between them and took alternating four-hour stints behind the wheel. That was the master plan anyway.

The Delahaye held its own for 11 hours—three hours into Connell’s second stint—until an exhaust gasket blew and Connell suffered burns to one foot. The car still drove, but the cockpit had become a six-cylinder sauna. The injured Connell bravely persevered to complete his second four-hour turn, but having handed over to Walker after 12 hours of the race—the halfway stage—Connell was forced to concede his burns were too severe for him to continue.

That left Walker with the task of driving the second 12 hours singlehandedly, from the middle of the night through to the following afternoon, in a car with a blown gasket, pumping scorching exhaust fumes into the cockpit. To Walker, inheritor of those indomitable Johnnie Walker genes, the thought of dropping out of the race was inconceivable.

There was no turning back. He simply had to keep driving.

“It was the middle of the night, and I was driving with this terrific heat coming through,” said Walker. “Fortunately I was wearing rope-soled shoes, and I would come in every now and again and jump into a bucket of water to wet my shoes and trousers to cool off and then I would get back in the thing again.”

Eighth place—with an average speed of 78.1mph over 24 hours and a blown exhaust gasket—was a courageous result against a field of genuine world class competitors. It was arguably the highlight of Walker’s career as a driver, and with the onset of war in Europe, it saw DUV 870 perform at its prime, albeit with a costly malfunction.

Having flown for the Fleet Air Arm during the war, Walker returned to motor racing to become the first private team owner to secure victory in a Formula One World Championship Grand Prix, at the 1958 Argentine. British racing legend Stirling Moss was at the wheel of a CooperClimax car that day, with an engine of far lass capacity than its rival Ferraris. Walker was universally liked and admired in motor racing for his energy and integrity, and throughout four years of racing together Walker and superstar Moss never signed a contract. Their collaboration was sealed by handshakes alone, and fuelled by a mutual desire to overturn the odds against the dominant “works teams” of Formula 1.

“I would come in every now and again and jump into a bucket of water to wet my shoes and trousers”

Rob Walker (above) and Stirling Moss (left) formed an enduring partnership based on mutual trust and shared passion

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REVIVAL OF A RACING ICON

COLOR CODE

It is thought that only 14 of the Delahaye 135s cars were built, and that fewer than 10 exist today. Walker sold his twice—as a man who wanted to look to the future, not linger on the past—yet his attachment to the old DUV 870 proved stronger than he could resist, and so he eventually bought the car back each time. The two were destined to be together. Today, DUV 870 remains in the Walker family, and is homed at the Haynes International Motor Museum in Somerset, southwest England.

And does the car still run? Well, Johnnie Walker put it to the test for its current “Gentleman’s Wager II” campaign for its iconic Blue Label whisky. In a short film starring British actor Jude Law and Italian Giancarlo Giannini, the Italian introduces Law to his “prize possession,” the dusty Delahaye—licence plate DUV 870—which “has not run for 40 years,” adds Giannini.

Law is so taken by the Delahaye that he poses a gentleman’s wager: the car would be his if he could fix it and drive it to “Monaco by noon tomorrow.” Giannini agrees, and the plot is set.

So as not to spoil the journey you will have to visit the Johnnie Walker YouTube channel to see how the caper unfolds, but we are left wondering if the Delahaye’s former owner, Rob Walker, would approve of such a wager. Our assumption is he would, as he was certainly one for taking on the odds. Once, for a gentlemanly wager of his own, a young Walker completed a cross-country horseracing course—what is called “point to point” in the UK—in a Tiger Moth biplane, racing along fields and hurdling hedges to entertain spectators between the scheduled horse races.

He won the wager, but was also slapped with a lifetime’s ban from civilian flying.

National racing colors emerged during the formative era of motor racing at the turn of the 20th century. The colors were not officially assigned but new traditions stuck fast, with French Racing Blue adopted by French manufacturers such as Bugatti and Delahaye.

Italian red—”Rosso Corsa”—quickly became synonymous with Alfa Romeo before Ferrari also adopted it, British Racing Green was established by Bentley, while German teams gravitated to white or silver. The American racing colors of white with parallel navy stripes were first sported by Briggs Cunningham II’s teams in the 1950s.

These “Cunningham stripes” were the sport’s original racing stripes.

FRANCE

I TA LY

Bleu de France

Rosso corsa

UNITED KINGDOM

GERMANY

British racing green

Silver

U N I T E D S TAT E S

Cunningham racing stripes

Giancarlo Giannini (left) and Jude Law contemplate their latest gentleman’s wager over a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue Label

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Whether you’re over one, scraping the bottom of one, shooting fish in one, rolling one out or filling one with monkeys or laughs, some part of your life has been contained in a barrel. They’ve held dry goods, produce, water and more. Today they’re primarily used for the fun stuff—wine, whiskies and other spirits, which is fine with us. Here, we take a small look at the big deal that is the humble barrel.

I

t’s a funny shape, the barrel, but it only takes a second for it to make sense. The bulge in the middle serves a purpose in that a large, well-built barrel can be tipped on its side and rolled and steered quite easily, no matter its overall weight. When it comes to the subject of wine and whisky, that certainly helps workers move product around, but ease of transport is the least of the barrel’s contributions to the finished product. In fact, anyone enjoying a tipple should raise a glass to the mighty barrel, which imparts color, flavor and texture to whisky. How it does that involves a complex series of chemical reactions, one affected by a barrel’s age and history. The timeline is much easier to understand—and to appreciate, for while a barrel spends much of its life just sitting around, its journey can be as rich as the liquid it delivers.

Most barrels used for whisky—that is, whisky without the “e,” otherwise known as Scotch—have already made a contribution to the world of spirits as vessels for bourbon or, in lesser amount, for some type of wine. Most are made from American oak, though there are instances in which barrels from Spain or other areas are used. And distilleries like Glenmorangie and the houses that feed the likes of Johnnie Walker have their own criteria for what they believe to be the perfect barrels.

“A tree must be at least 80 years old to supply enough heartwood for a barrel’s manufacture, and the company actively manages its oak forests to ensure wood will always be available,” says Dr. Bill Lumsden, Glenmorangie’s Master Distiller, who answered a few questions for us. As he mentioned, Glenmorangie manages forests in Missouri, from whence its barrels are made to the distiller’s specifications.

After a barrel is made, it often goes to work at a bourbon distillery, living in Kentucky or somewhere else and aging the fine corn-based libation for a number of

years. Following that, as bourbon distillers mostly like fresh barrels, the used barrel goes abroad.

“American oak, ex-bourbon, makes up 90 percent of the casks in all warehouses in Scotland, and there are 20 million maturing there at the moment,” says Ewan Morgan, national director of Diageo’s Masters of Whisky and a longtime fixture in the whisky industry.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider that used bourbon barrels sell for between $225 and $375 apiece. As Morgan says, “Times that by 20 million and that’s a lot. It’s an incredible business.”

No kidding, but the barrels are critical pieces of the whisky puzzle, and so the price is worth it, he adds.

In Glenmorangie’s case, Lumsden says that over a minimum of 10 years aging his whisky, “the barrels will impart two-thirds of whisky’s flavor. Specifically, the full range of effects of a barrel on the whisky inside are too numerous to mention, but it does remove harshness and add mellowness, smoothness and sweetness. It also adds color to the whisky, allows it to develop complexity and catalyses the formation of new compounds. Wood extractives are also added, including lactones (coconut flavor) tannin (responsible for mouth-feel) and wood sugars, and there’s fragrance from oxidation reactions.”

All of this usually takes place in cool, damp warehouses, which helps to develop fragrance and complexity, he adds, explaining that once barrels are in place they’re rarely if ever moved.

“They’re pretty tough,” says Morgan. “If you think about it, you look around the world and there are barrels maturing in the Caribbean for rum, up in the north of Canada with Crown Royal, way up in Manitoba where the temperatures get way, way down, in more steady environments like on Islay [in Scotland] where you don’t

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Over 10 years, up to 20% of a barrel’s contents can be lost to evaporation

have a huge amount of temperature fluctuation… ” Barrels’ toughness means that distilleries can get as many as 100 years’ worth of use out of one, which sounds like a lot until you consider that whiskies are aged for a long, long time.

For their part, Lumsden says Glenmorangie uses barrels only twice, while Morgan points out that the changing character of a barrel over time might make it more appropriate for different projects throughout its lifetime.

Though barrels have already been used when they’re received by whisky distilleries, Morgan explains that a distillery’s first use of the barrel is referred to as a “first fill.”

“When we get them in they’ll be assessed, a team of people go through them and look at them: ‘this is in good shape, this one needs some work to it, this one has an off character note to it.’

They’ll go and smell them, and they’ll use sulphur candles inside a barrel to kill off bacteria if they feel it needs it.

“If you’re making a single malt, like a Talisker,

you wouldn’t necessarily want to put that into a fresh American barrel, which can dominate the flavor. So what they’ll do with single malts is go into second fill barrels. The barrels are less active, so the whisky can mature longer. The last thing you want to do is to lose your distillery character.

So a 30-year-old Talisker wouldn’t have been in a first fill, it will be in a second or maybe even third fill, because they knew it was going to be there for a good length of time.”

In Glenmorangie’s case, they use their barrels only twice, Lumsden says, because with repeated uses the barrels don’t mellow the whisky to the brand’s taste. In cases where a former wine or sherry barrel has been used, residue can actually turn the whisky sour as well. Lumsden also points out that each year, approximately two percent of the Glenmorangie in each barrel is lost to evaporation. Known as the “angel’s share,” the loss over 10 years will be roughly 20 percent of the barrel’s contents, which is an awful lot of good stuff for the angels.

While the variations among barrels create brilliant subtleties in whiskies, these year-on-year differences can pose a headache for houses that offer blended whiskies to market, such as Johnnie Walker.

“I always say no two whiskies are the same, and no two barrels are the same,” says Morgan. “And so getting it right for us is all down to the skill of our blending team.

With Johnnie Walker you’re looking at 20 million cases globally per year and every single bottle—Red to Blue and beyond—has to taste identical year on year, the color has to be identical, and we’re picking different whiskies from different distillers to create that. But a distiller might not have the whisky they had before, or a blend has whiskies from distilleries that are closed, and so we have to

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re-formulate that every year, to make sure it tastes exactly the same by using different ingredients. It’s like trying to bake a cake using completely different ingredients and make it taste the same as before. People around the world who are in love with things like Johnnie Walker Black would pick out anything different.

“Variances in cask types are part of it. Obviously our team have a decent rule of thumb of what it’s going to taste like, what kind of cask, what year, first or second or third fill or rejuvenated barrel. They have a fairly good idea but they always rely on their noses, They take in samples from barrels, then sit there and sniff against controls, against a liquid they’ve used before. And they will sniff blind, they won’t even know what they’re smelling. ‘This is off slightly, you have to use this distillery…’ It’s a huge jigsaw puzzle, and those people are freaks of nature. I don’t know how they do it, they have incredible palettes. And of course it’s not just with us: you’ve got people like Dr. Bill Lumsden at Glenmorangie, and there are others.”

In terms of any potential issues with barrels beyond one being too exhausted for further use, supply can occasionally be a problem, especially in the case of sherry casks or other variations used to color a whisky.

There are longterm agreements to buy certain number of barrels from a specific sherry producer, Morgan explains, agreements that go back many years. In some cases, he says,

Variations in barrels and in whisky supplies create challenges for blended whisky-makers distillers will actually pay for the sherry barrels to be made in the first place, then purchase them after they’ve been used by the sherry maker, just to ensure the required quality is received. In Glenmorangie’s case, as mentioned above, they maintain their own control of forests in Missouri to ensure they get exactly what they want, and they’re not the only one.

“I would think the only issue in recent memory happened just other year,” Morgan says. “The logging industry in the U.S. had a bad year in felling trees, and that obviously led to a slight shortage of barrels going to cooperages in the United States. You started to see a price increase—and supply from Scotland is voracious, it never stops, they have to work 24-7 year-round to keep up with demand.”

Challenging, diverse, expensive and an incredibly pertinent component to making good whisky, it boggles the mind. So much so, we’ve decided simply to stick to enjoying the end result. To coopers and master distillers everywhere, cheers. Now roll out the barrel…

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HERITAGE HANDCRAFTED When a barrel has run its course aging fine whisky or serving another purpose, craftsman James Broyhill turns it into something else.

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PUBLIC SERVICE They used to say golf clubhouses would never catch on. After all, what was wrong with retreating to the pub after a game? Golf pubs once thrived in the UK, but today they are an endangered species‌

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W

e would love to recommend a wee dram in the RED LION INN in Prestwick to Kingdom readers, but we can’t. On the west coast of Scotland, it is one of the oldest golf pubs in existence and historically, arguably, the most significant.

But honestly, we can’t pretend it will live up to any kind of expectation. The Red Lion was where Old Tom Morris had his own bar stool, it is where the idea for the [British] Open was conceived and it was where the golfers enjoyed lunch between rounds of the inaugural Open in 1860, but despite this peerless golfing heritage, today, 155 years later, the old Red Lion has long lost its roar.

Old Tom Morris moved from St Andrews to Prestwick to build a new golf course in 1851. He and his family lived in a small house by the course, on the Ayr Road and opposite the Red Lion Inn. The Red Lion was well positioned to offer refuge and refreshment to travellers taking the stagecoach route between Ayr and Glasgow—Scotland’s fast-growing industrial heart at that time. It was also centrally situated for Prestwick’s 2,000 locals and in particular, to the town’s golfers once Prestwick Golf Club opened that year.

In the 19th century it was customary for golf courses to be established without the relatively prohibitive expense of building a clubhouse, so a good local “public house” was always popular with golfers. The Red Lion was a prime example, and while the eight golfers in the first [British] Open had no prize money at stake, they were grateful to

Prestwick Golf Club for covering the costs of their lunch at the Red Lion (taken between the two 12-hole rounds of the one-day championship).

Life for the Red Lion couldn’t be more different today.

Travellers between Ayr and Glasgow no longer need a pit stop, golfers eat and drink in the now famous Prestwick clubhouse and there is plenty more competition for custom from the locals.

In their book Tom Morris of St Andrews, David Malcolm and Peter Crabtree write, “The inn stands to this day and from the outside at least, has changed little.” Not changed? No kidding. The Red Lion is dark, dingy, unkempt and uninviting. There are a few old sepia pictures on the walls in a gesture to its heritage as the first home to The Open, a sandwich and a pint is fine and the service is friendly, but when Kingdom ventured over its threshold earlier this year it felt like the Red Lion was living on borrowed time.

It is a great pity better care has not been taken of this golfing landmark but sentiment is rarely the basis of a sound business plan. The Red Lion serves as a sobering—if you will—indictment of British pub culture in the 21st century.

The Brits simply don’t support pubs as they used to. Pubs are less often the social hubs of communities as people have become increasingly mobile and as the glitz of city nightlife has become more accessible and more appealing than the familiar coziness of a “local.” The result is pubs up and down the UK are disappearing with unfortunate regularity.

The Red Lion Inn, in the heart of Prestwick, has seen better days

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Keeping up tradition Not many pubs are older than THE GOLF TAVERN in Edinburgh. Owners claim it opened in 1456, and it flanks common land that would become the Bruntsfield Links.

The pub served as clubhouse for the links, which remains “the world’s oldest short golf course” today—even though the Bruntsfield Links Society moved out to establish the Musselburgh Links in the 19th century (the course which would stage The Open six times between 1874 and 1889).

A city-center location has blessed The Golf Tavern with regular business for more than 500 years, and visitors to Edinburgh will be hard-pushed to find a better Scottish pub.

When the Bruntsfield golfers moved out to Musselburgh their new course enjoyed a pub of its own behind the fourth green, MRS. FORMAN’S INN. The pub remains open today although it no longer has a service hatch facing the green for golfers. Mrs. Forman’s does have a special footnote in golfing history thanks to a high-profile match in 1870 between Old Tom Morris and his Musselburgh rival Willie Park. A local crowd in its thousands was boisterous and extremely partisan, reportedly jeering and jostling St Andrews’ Morris—in an age before ropes separated professionals from the galleries. After Morris missed a putt on the fourth he sought refuge in Mrs. Forman’s, and perhaps calmed by the taste of Scotch and the crackle of the fire, he refused to return to continue the match. Park claimed victory at the time but an arbitrator later deemed the match null and void.

Competing with The Golf Tavern as the “best preserved” golf pub of long standing is the THE OLD CLUBHOUSE at Machrihanish Dunes in Argyll, in Scotland’s western reaches. The Old Clubhouse first welcomed golfers when the original Machrihanish Golf Club was established in 1876 and Machrihanish Dunes’ American owners, Southworth Development, have carefully renovated the pub.

Also recommended is the JIGGER INN at St Andrews, which sits beside the 17th fairway of the Old Course—the famous Road Hole. The pub is attached to tycoon Herb Kohler’s Old Course Hotel and it is less historic than the aforementioned establishments. The Jigger was originally the stationmaster’s lodge in the 1850s when the railway first reached St Andrews. The Links station closed in 1966, the hotel was built in 1968 on the site of the station and the stationmaster’s lodge would eventually be regenerated into one of the town’s most popular drinking holes.

Thinking of the “Old Grey Toon,” if you can’t make it there for a pint you could always try the ST ANDREWS TAVERN near Times Square, New York City, although customers will have to shut their eyes tight, muffle their ears and dig deep into a vivid imagination to enjoy even a vaguely Scottish pub experience here. The pub’s unique selling point is that its bar staff wear kilts, delivering an arrow into the heart of authenticity.

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KINGDOM’S TOP-10 GOLF PUBS 1.

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The impressive restoration of the Old Clubhouse at Machrihanish Dunes (below) and St Andrews’ Jigger Inn (bottom)

8.

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The Golf Tavern Edinburgh, Scotland The Old Clubhouse Machrihanish Dunes, Argyll, Scotland Jigger Inn St Andrews, Scotland Dunvegan Hotel St Andrews, Scotland Links Tavern Liphook, Hampshire, England Ty Coch Inn Nefyn & District GC, Gwynedd, Wales McKees Pub Bandon Dunes, Oregon Mrs. Forman’s Musselburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland The Old Clubhouse Gullane, East Lothian, Scotland The Prince of Wales Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan, Wales

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Top Company The drive from Buffalo to Cleveland takes a little under three hours, depending on the weather and traffic. It’s basically a straight shot down the coast of Lake Erie from upstate New York to Ohio, and it can be a nice drive, especially in spring when the baseball teams are just starting to dust off their cleats. However long it took in 1934 and however nice it was, the drive was worth it for Harold Koch, who made a deal that saw his family’s hat company become the official cap supplier to the Cleveland Indians baseball team. From that deal, the company— New Era Cap Co.—grew from a family firm into a global powerhouse that makes more than 50 million caps per year.

If that seems incredible, consider this: the motorcycle jacket, white T-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers cover everything else.

But when it comes to your head, if you’re an American, there’s the baseball cap. And where did that come from?

Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Harold Koch.

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Early cap ad (above left), three generations of Kochs (bottom left), Chris Koch today (above)

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“We get calls from fans all day long wanting caps; I’m going to take out an ad and see what happens”

he last time Buffalo, NY, had a professional baseball team was 1915, when the Buffalo Blues—who had the distinction of fielding Ed Porray, the only professional ball player whose birthplace was “on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean”—recorded a 74-78 season to come in sixth in the short-lived Federal League. In 1934, with no team at home and no team in nearby Toronto (yet), a young Harold Koch didn’t have many options. He’d recently joined his father Ehrhardt’s company, New Era Cap Co. (formerly the E. Koch Cap Co.), and while the firm was doing well, producing up to 60,000 “Gatsby”-style caps per year, Harold could see into the future. He knew the “fashionable cap” era was coming to an end, and as a young exec he recognized that baseball was

coming on strong. What better place for a cap company to be positioned than baseball, and so Harold drove to Cleveland. The deal New Era struck with the Cleveland Indians led to Harold and Co. hitting the drawing board and the standardization of what we now call the baseball cap, a hat that found its official form in New Era’s 59FIFTY, which debuted in 1954.

“My grandfather, I remember him talking about the reason he developed the 59FIFTY,” says current New Era CEO Chris Koch. “If we go back in time and look at baseball players, even though they were all wearing the same thing on their heads, it looked different. It’s part of a uniform, and he wanted them to all look the same. If you have a bunch of police officers lined up, the hat that’s on their head makes all of them look the same. Military people, firefighters, and so on. And so my grandfather wanted to develop a cap that when a team lined up they all looked the same.”

The basic shape of the 59FIFTY features a high, stiff crown, and it sits roughly the same on every wearer’s head, yielding the uniformity that Harold rightly knew would serve the game well. The materials and colors have changed over the years, but the 59FIFTY is now regarded as the baseball cap, and that’s due to a combination of perfect design and widespread acceptance.

Under Harold’s guidance, what started with the Cleveland Indians turned into relationships across the whole of baseball, ranging from the pros through colleges and all the way into Little League. That saturation within the sport created a market awareness beyond just the players and the pros and those “in the know” and that set the stage for New Era’s next big change, which would come with Harold’s son David in the 1980s.

“It was interesting, a point in time when… I don’t know, you could never really get the pro stuff before,” says Chris. “I think it was early ’80s, and we were eating dinner one night and my father, he said, ‘you know, we get all these calls all day long from people who want to buy the cap the players are wearing. And we don’t do that, we don’t service that business. So I’m going to take out an ad in the Sporting News and see what happens.’

“The number was like $12.95, ‘Send a check with a size and team that you want and we’ll send you a cap.’

And so the ad went in. And a couple of weeks later—well, we were in Angola, NY [by Buffalo]. My dad would go to Post Office every day pick up mail, get a little box of mail.

So he went in one day and they gave him a little box, and he was leaving but they said, ‘That’s not all, there’s some in the back!’ ‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘There are bags in the back, three or four or five gigantic mail bags just stuffed full of letters.’ He didn’t even think about what it was, he just threw them in the car, went back to the office and started slitting open envelopes.

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“Every one of them had a check in it with a note: ‘Please send me NY Yankees cap, size 7.25.’ That’s when we sort of realized that there was a business out there. I think that’s what changed the way we looked at everything.”

Just as David’s father Harold had changed the company by marrying it to baseball, David’s “Eureka!” moment shifted things dramatically for New Era, and the timing could not have been better. In America, a love of all things sports was developing. Baseball card sales, sports memorabilia and everything connecting people to their favorite teams—all of it was on the rise and New Era was there, providing official MLB caps to enthusiastic fans. By the time Chris—the fourth generation Koch to helm New Era— came into the company, things were rolling. Like his grandfather and father before him, Chris would shift the family cap business into yet another gear.

Fittingly, it began with baseball.

“I originally was going to be an architect,” Chris says.

“But I came to work for the company after I got out of high school, and I went to school at night doing business classes.

It was smaller, growing, and needed the help, so that was the path I took. It wasn’t the easiest path to take, but I don’t regret it at all, 37 years later.”

Nor does the company and its fans. Shortly after being appointed CEO, Chris signed a 1993 deal making New Era the exclusive on-field cap provider for the whole of MLB. It was yet another massive leap for the family business.

“The early ’90s was when the whole fan market took off,” he says. “Everybody wanted to wear what was being worn on the field of play, and that’s when our retail customers, Champs and Foot Locker and people like that, that’s when that business really took off.”

The sudden uptick in business led Chris to two crucial ideas. One, he decided that the company’s story should be told, that the longterm affiliation with baseball was bigger than just the one sport, that it pointed to a part in the greater world of sports heritage overall, and that the brand identity should benefit from its hard work and longevity.

This idea led to the American flag being factored into New Era’s marketing, which it has been since roughly 1997.

“The second part of it was that I wanted to try to expand internationally, from the standpoint of selling into other countries. We were starting to market the brand and to grow consumer awareness of the brand, and from the mid to late ’90s I’ve spent my career on that.”

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“I wanted to tell our story, and for us to go international”

Early days in the New Era factory, the NFL’s cap of choice, early packaging

Chris has succeeded—wildly succeeded—on both points. New Era’s story was told well enough to set the stage for deals beyond baseball, with the company’s first foray off the diamond coming on the sidelines of the NFL. New Era had already made pennants for NFL concessions, but a new deal saw them providing all caps for the sidelines.

That led to college deals, with distribution in college bookstores, then other sports like the NBA

and the NHL and more Branded store in Japan, the legendary 59FIFTY sporting a soccer team’s logo

distribution and so on.

“The way we look at it right now, if there’s a sport where somebody is wearing a cap as part of the game—even in golf right now, which while it’s not necessarily needed to be worn to play the game, if it’s worn on the golf course by a professional player—it should be our product, around the world. Quite frankly, that’s how we look at it. If it’s headwear that’s worn, we do it. In Australia, with cricket, we do a bunch of teams. We didn’t do that a few years ago.

Korean Baseball League, Japanese baseball league, that’s our push to have our product on those players. I think our history, and being on the sidelines of the NFL, it gives us the authenticity with soccer (or ‘football’), with those clubs.

We sell all the soccer clubs in Brazil. We’re able to do that because of our authenticity.”

Germany’s Martin Kaymer wears New Era and is one of many top athletes to promote the brand around the world.

And globally speaking, New Era is more than just caps.

“As you go to other parts of the world, a lot of our business is apparel and accessories. In Brazil, for example, half of our business is apparel. In Japan we’re the largest backpack distributor, bigger than backpack companies, New Era-branded backpacks, apparel, and not necessarily sports. In the U.S. this is what’s happened: we have 95 years of sports heritage as an authentic headwear company, and so it’s been hard to be anything else but that. But as you get into other countries around the world we’re just a brand, and they expect to see apparel, backpacks, and accessories.”

As Chris explains, to keep this model successful New Era has certainly grown beyond the confines of the MLB season. They’re now a year-round operation that seeks to tell its story wherever, and however, possible, and that begins with the retailers.

“You put all the major sports together and the international stuff together and the other stuff we do, action sports, golf, NASCAR, all that. And what it really is, is creating a story on the wall, that’s what we talk about all the time with retailers, we’re not a company where we go in and sell you some caps and next season we come back again.

“The wall might change a little bit from season to season, from the sports standpoint. But what it really does, because of all the custom fashion stuff we do, there could be 20 different types of Yankees caps on the wall, for example, with different logos and styles, and we do that across all sports.”

Spike Lee asked New Era for the first-ever red Yankees cap, which he got. Since then New Era has brought all manner of team variations to consumers, and fans love it.

“We’re giving the consumers different options, different things to wear,” says Chris. “Our whole thing is that nobody needs another cap. What we try to create is somebody wanting another cap, knowing when they go back into a retail store there’s going to be something new there.”

When Chris joined in the early 1990s, he says the company brought in less than $6 million in sales. Today, he says, “We’re creeping up on a billion.” And it all started with a single office in Buffalo, and with a drive to Cleveland.

“I think it was proximity more than anything,” Chris says. “In 1934, getting in a car and driving somewhere, well, Cleveland was close. There were no teams in Toronto, which would have been a little bit closer.

“I think the big thing is that we have the authenticity, that we’re tied to MLB, that our caps are something that’s actually worn on the field of play during a sport and so it’s part of the uniform and it’s been part of the uniform forever, since we developed the 59FIFTY back in the ’50s. It’s a cap that sort of stood the test of time.”

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A technological alternative In an age of titanium, lithium and satellite navigation, Clive Agran offers a distinctly British alternative to technology on the golf course

S

idney’s ball was still rising as it soared over the back of the 17th green. It ricocheted off the uppermost branches of what I believe is an Italian poplar tree, and bounced thrice on the roof of a storm shelter before disturbing two mallard ducks as it splashed into a deep pond by the second green. Sidney was not happy. I, on the other hand, felt that exquisite pleasure that invariably accompanies going dormy but, ever the sportsman, I resisted the temptation to gloat and instead said, “Hard luck” with as much sincerity as I could muster.

“HARD LUCK?” roared Sidney, unable to conceal his considerable anger. “You told me it was 217 yards. I hit a bloody three wood!”

“And very sweetly, if I may say,” I commented.

“But it can’t have been more than 150!”

“Sorry, I thought you were asking me the time. It was 2:17 and now it’s 2:18, if that’s any help.”

The confusion had arisen because I was wearing a Garmin watch, which Sidney had mistakenly thought was one of those new-fangled devices that tells you the distance to the flag. Mine doesn’t do any such thing, but I wear it because I occasionally go running and it records how far and how slowly I’ve run. So when he asked me what my watch said, I more or less innocently told him, “2:17.” In case you’re curious, I went on to win by two holes as Sidney seethed all the way down the last and ran up an ugly eight.

In the bar, seeing my opponent so miserable gave me precious little pleasure, but I must confess I had very little

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sympathy. Golf, for me, is a blissful escape from a frenetic, techno-dominated world and an increasingly alarming dependence on gadgets and gizmos. It’s possible that my perspective has, to some extent at least, been partially skewed by my own spectacular inability to “get on” with technology. For example, although I acquired a smart-phone some nine months ago, I still can’t access my emails with it.

Texting, I’m afraid, is the dismal summit of my capability.

Why, I wonder, should some techno-savvy highhandicapper with a less elegant shoulder-turn but a greater knowledge of suitable software enjoy a competitive edge over me just because he knows his apps from his elbows?

Okay, I understand that you don’t necessarily need a degree in computer programming to operate much of the equipment that is nowadays all too frequently found on a golf course but that’s not to say it should be encouraged. For example, although the word “laser” puts the fear of God into my Luddite heart, I could probably figure out which knobs to twiddle on an optical rangefinder. But is it right that so much human resource is invested in developing ever more accurate devices so that golfers know the distance to the flag more precisely? Seriously, isn’t conquering cancer a more pressing problem for scientists to address?

Perhaps my jaundiced view is due in part to the fact that knowing the precise distance is of little help to someone who—depending on the quality of the contact—can hit a 7-iron anywhere between 25 and 205 yards (the latter, by the way, was achieved with a thinned shot off a downhill lie).

Golf Cart Curmudgeon Although I’m aware that the internal combustion engine was developed quite some time ago and that it therefore falls well outside the category of new technology, I nevertheless remain implacably opposed to carts. To my purist mind they are the devil incarnate and the complete antithesis of everything golf should be, i.e. healthy exercise in a tranquil environment. To compound the felony, carts nowadays come complete with a GPS device that acts like Big Brother.

As well as revealing distances, it alerts you as to how far you have fallen behind the game in front and brings you to a grinding halt if you venture into an environmentally sensitive area or some other “no-go zone.” Having denied you exercise it then further contributes to the world obesity epidemic by ordering a range of unhealthy snacks and sugary drinks from the halfway house.

To my mind, manual trollies [or “pull carts”] are the quintessentially appropriate technology and, provided the wheels remain well oiled, represent a comparatively noiseless and environmentally sensitive alternative to the horrible cart. And I have never been attracted to electric trollies because they are technologically more sophisticated,

Golf is an escape from technology for me, not another chance to employ it

have more moving parts and consequently frequently break down. More particularly, because they often run amok and wipe out groups of innocent bystanders, those that are remote controlled should all join Sidney’s ball in that pond.

But then again—broadminded to a fault—I must embrace all trollies as an ally in the war on contemptible carts.

Keen students of our great game will have noticed a glaring omission in this assessment of available aids.

Although they might resent being lumped alongside yardage charts and GPS devices, caddies are a colorful relic of a bygone age who are now seriously under threat of extinction.

Invariably sad social misfits with a wide range of personality disorders that effectively disqualifies them from any meaningful employment, caddies nevertheless add a welcome touch of color to proceedings. Not only that, but I also almost always play better when accompanied by a grizzled geezer with a bigger chip on his shoulder than anything I would attempt from just off the green. Perhaps listening to their litany of woes provides a welcome distraction from my own golfing incompetence or it might simply be schadenfreude that lifts my spirits, who knows?

And I reinforce the feel-good factor by looking upon their inflated fee as a charitable donation.

For those of us who regret the demise of the featherie and passing of the stymie, saving the caddie could be the cause around which we rally to demonstrate our determined opposition to our game being over-run by technology.

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Zepp Golf Kit

Callaway Rangefinder

Measure the most important aspects of your golf swing, then analyze and improve each one. Zepp offers an incredible set of 3D and video analysis features that give you instant feedback on club position and biomechanics. You can even compare your swing to the pros. Learn how to increase your club speed and measure how much you’re improving. Add 5 MPH and you’ll hit the ball an extra 20+ yards off the tee. zepp.com

The Callaway Hybrid Rangefinder combines the pin-seeking precision of a laser with the added convenience of a GPS—all in one compact device. Whether trying to carry a bunker off the tee, hit your approach shot to the middle of the green or firing at the flag, the Callaway hybrid rangefinder maximizes distance information from tee to green, and lets you take aim with confidence. callawaygolf.com

TrackMan 4

Steadihead Putting Sophisticated, straightforward and effective, the Steadihead putting training aid is the most affordable hi-tech method of training yourself to align your eyes directly over the ball—key to successful putting.

The comfortable device wears rather like a pair of lensless glasses, and projects a laser beam exactly where the eyes are looking. By keeping the red dot of the laser on your ball you’ll learn to keep your head in perfect position, and by tracking the laser from your ball to the hole in a smooth, straight line, you’ll learn to rotate your head on a plane and to see your intended line clearly. Developed by LPGA teaching pro Bobbi Salmon, the Steadihead gives real time feedback on head movement and is one of the quickest means to dropping your putts—and your score. steadiheadputting.com

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Long known as the authority in terms of delivering swing data, TrackMan announces the new TrackMan 4. The culmination of a three-year journey which began as an initiative to design and engineer the most powerful and accurate Launch Monitor ever built. The outcome is Dual Radar Technology: a radical transformation in the way radar technology is applied in golf today.

Using two radar systems instead of one to obtain maximum data quality and increased pick up rates. Data delivered in its purest form. Every time. On every shot. trackmangolf.com

Zach Johnson Class of 2003

The Path to the PGA TOUR.

速

Every year the Web.com Tour awards 50 PGA TOUR速 cards. Former Web.com Tour players account for three out of four current PGA TOUR cardholders and over 421 PGA TOUR victories, showing that the Web.com Tour produces some of the best golfers in the world.

Congratulations to the Web.com Tour class of 2015.

Patton Kizzire Class of 2015

PIE You might have your fingers in several, or you could be staring up at one floating in the sky. You’re fortunate if you meet the cutie variety, less so if you’re served the humble flavor. It could be as easy as, and if it’s apple then it’s certainly as American as. However it’s divided, you should bring a fork, keep the whipped cream handy—and always make sure you get your slice. In any season, it’s pie

ALL PURPOSE PIE DOUGH The stage on which the whole show is set, a good crust is essential to a good pie.

Makes 1 pie crust, top and bottom + 2 ½ cups all purpose, unbleached flour + 1 ½ sticks cold unsalted butter from grassfed cows, cut into ¼” cubes + ¾ teaspoons table salt + 6 tablespoons ice cold water

• Using a KitchenAid stand mixer, cut the salt, flour and cold butter together. Work the mixture until it is grainy with pea-sized lumps of butter. Do not over mix, the lumps of butter will help create a flaky crust.

• Making sure the water is as cold as it can be without freezing, add half the ice water and mix it in for a short time. After the dough’s consistency changes slightly, add the second half of the water.

Do not over mix.

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• Divide the dough in half and form each half into a disk. Wrap each disk tightly in plastic wrap and let rest in the refrigerator for at least

four hours or overnight.

The dough can be frozen for up to three weeks.

CLASSIC APPLE PIE What you order when you want a taste of home—even if you’re home already.

+ 2 ½ lbs apples, peeled, cored and cut into thin wedges (roughly five apples—a mix of granny smith and pink lady works well) + 2 tablespoons unsalted butter + ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon, or more to taste + ½ teaspoon good quality vanilla extract + ¾ cups turbinado sugar + 2 tablespoons all purpose unbleached flour + 2 teaspoons cornstarch + ½ tablespoon lemon juice + 1 egg, lightly beaten

• Melt butter in a large sauté pan over medium high heat and add apples. Stir to coat the apples in the melted butter. Sprinkle salt, spices and sugar over apples and stir to combine. Cook until the apples just begin to soften, 4-5 minutes. Sprinkle cornstarch over apples and stir continuously for another 2-3 minutes. Do not overcook the apples or they will become mushy in the pie. Remove pan from heat and add lemon juice. Stir to combine, move apples into a bowl and set aside.

• Preheat oven to 425F • Remove 1 disk of dough from the refrigerator and roll out on a lightly floured surface until it is roughly 12 inches in diameter. Carefully lay the dough into a 9 inch pie pan, trimming along the edge with a sharp knife so that there is about a ½ inch overhang. Place the pie pan, with the dough, in the freezer.

• On a lightly floured surface, roll out the second disk of dough until it is roughly 11 inches in diameter.

• Remove pie crust from freezer and spoon apple filling into the cold pie shell. Cover with second disk, press the edges together tightly and either seal using the tines of a fork, or fold over to create the crust edge.

Trim any excess. Cut three or four

steam vents in the top of the pie.

Lightly brush the top of the pie with egg whites and sprinkle with a little sugar (optional).

• Reduce oven temperature to 375F and place pie in oven. Bake for 40-50 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown. Remove and let rest at room temperature for an hour before serving.

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PERFECT BLUEBERRY PIE Good in pancakes or yoghurt, blueberries are even better in pie.

+ + + + + + + + +

1 egg white, lightly beaten 4 cups blueberries, rinsed and dried ½ cup and two tbsp water, divided 2 tbsp cornstarch ½ cup turbinado sugar 2 tsp fresh-squeezed lemon juice Pinch of salt Freshly whipped cream for garnish Dried beans, enough to fill pie crust while baking

For the crust: • Roll out dough on a lightly floured surface until it is roughly 12 inches in diameter. Trim excess dough around the edge, so that there is ½ inch to 1 inch overhang. Fold this over and crimp. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for at least an hour.

• Preheat oven to 425F at least 20 minutes before baking the crust.

• Remove the pie crust in the pan from the refrigerator and line it with parchment paper, folding and pleating as necessary to fit in the pie shell. Fill with dried beans and bake for 20 minutes.

• Remove pie crust from oven and gently lift out the parchment paper and beans. Using a fork, poke holes in the bottom and sides of the crust and bake for further 5-7 minutes, or until the crust is a pale golden color. Check after 3 minutes and pop any bubbles that may have formed.

• Remove from oven and let cool 5 minutes. Brush the bottom and sides with egg white.

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For the filling: • Measure out 1 cup of blueberries and place them in a saucepan with ½ cup water—these blueberries can be substituted for frozen if needed. Cover and bring them to a boil, once they reach a boil, reduce the heat and simmer, stirring constantly for 3-4 minutes or until the blueberries begin to burst and the juices thicken.

• Meanwhile, in a bowl, whisk together the cornstarch and the remaining 2 tablespoons of water until the cornstarch is no longer lumpy.

• Stirring continuously, add the cornstarch mixture, sugar, lemon juice and salt. Simmer for another minute until all ingredients are well combined. Remove from heat and gently fold in the remaining 3 cups of blueberries.

• Spoon the mixture into the baked pie shell and allow to sit at room temperature for at least 2 hours before serving.

• Serve with freshly whipped cream.

HEAVENLY PECAN PIE This will keep Georgia on your mind, even if you’ve never been south of New York City

+ + + + + + + + + +

¾ stick unsalted butter 1 ¼ cups packed light brown sugar ¾ cup light corn syrup 2 ½ tsp quality vanilla extract ¼ tsp freshly grated orange zest ¼ teaspoon cinnamon ¼ teaspoon salt 3 farm fresh eggs 2 cups pecans, halves Freshly whipped cream or vanilla ice cream to accompany

•

Preheat oven to 350F

•

Roll out dough on a lightly floured surface until it is roughly 12 inches in diameter. Trim excess dough around the edge, so that there is ½ inch to 1 inch overhang. Fold this over and crimp with your fingers or the tines of a fork. Using a fork, poke holes all over bottom and sides. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for at least an hour, alternately you can place in the freezer for 10 minutes.

•

Meanwhile, melt butter over medium heat. Add brown sugar and stir until smooth. Remove from heat and stir in corn syrup, vanilla, zest and salt. Lightly beat eggs and whisk into corn syrup mixture. Make sure the corn syrup has cooled enough not to cook the eggs. It should be warm, but not too hot.

•

Put pecans in pie shell and pour corn syrup mixture evenly over them. Bake pie for 50-60 minutes.

Let cool completely before serving with freshly whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

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Field of Champions A few months after Arnold Palmer completed his half-century of years on this planet, the idea of a professional Tour for the over-50s began to take root. From this small acorn grew a mighty oak, one that delivered possibly the most lucrative pension plan in sport. But without Mr. Palmer’s support and involvement at the time, there would be no Champions Tour today. Paul Trow looks back in time‌ 1984: Palmer lifts the winning trophy

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rnold Palmer’s leadership in building the modern PGA TOUR into a sports powerhouse replete with dynamic media coverage and sponsorship dollars is common knowledge in the golf world. Less well-documented, though, is the role he played in helping to establish the Champions Tour.

Peering back through the prism of this year’s end-ofseason Charles Schwab Cup Championship, with the dust settled on 24 (mostly three-round) tournaments delivering some $50 million in earnings and virtually no cuts to miss, it is scarcely believable that this popular and thriving endeavor very nearly failed to get off the ground.

However, back in 1978, when Arnold Palmer was in his late 40s and still battling away on the PGA TOUR, there was considerable skepticism when the producers of Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf, an iconic made-for-television series spawned in the 1960s, cobbled together a speculative spin-off entitled the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf.

This show featured a better-ball match at Onion Creek Country Club in Austin, Texas, between four veteran golfers who were determined to prove they could still play. What unfolded was a thrilling spectacle involving Sam Snead, Gardner Dickinson, Kel Nagle and Peter Thomson.

For Snead, then 66, it was a majestic swansong as he finished with a hat-trick of birdies to lift himself and Dickinson from two down with three to play to a one-hole victory over their Australian opponents. The Americans thus shared a prize pot of $100,000—hardly an insignificant sum at the time. In the wake of such pyrotechnics, the field was expanded for the following year’s edition (also at Onion Creek) telecast nationally by NBC. Pessimists, of whom there were many, deemed it unlikely to match the inaugural event for excitement, but their predictions proved hopelessly wide of the mark.

With birdies on the last two holes of regulation play, Roberto de Vicenzo and Julius Boros hauled themselves into sudden-death with Tommy Bolt and Art Wall. As the players then chucked birdies at each other like confetti, the playoff stretched to six holes and, crucially, long into prime time. After much friendly horseplay for the cameras, from De Vicenzo and Bolt in particular, the charismatic Argentine and Boros emerged the winners.

“I recall the irresistible drama of this particular match because there was a men’s closing-day dinner going on at Latrobe Country Club that evening and nobody in the men’s grill would go upstairs to the dinner until the action was over,” Palmer writes in his autobiography, A Golfer’s Life.

The future was thus assured for the Legends of Golf as an annual TV fixture, and it continues to thrive 37 years on, albeit now sponsored by Bass Pro Shops and staged at Big Cedar Lodge in Ridgedale, Missouri.

But there was a bigger picture being sketched. The momentum this memorable 1979 shoot-out created also prompted a number of battle-hardened players to visit commissioner Deane Beman in his office at the PGA Tour’s headquarters in Ponte Vedra, Florida, in January 1980 to discuss the feasibility of an over-50s tour. Present were Snead, Boros, Dickinson, Bob Goalby, Don January and Dan Sikes—“none shy about individually airing their views,” according to Palmer.

At that meeting, it was generally agreed the fledgling project would need a marquee name to sell it to the public and to potential sponsors without undermining the main tour. “Since I was pretty well connected in the corporate world and was still showing up to play on the regular tour from time to time, that person turned out to be me,” recalls Palmer, who at that point had just turned 50.

59th Senior PGA Championship held at the PGA National Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. April 16-19, 1998

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WALK WITH LEGENDS. Colin Montgomerie

Jeff Maggert

Bernhard Langer

“Experience the most accessible, accommodating and engaging entertainment in professional golf.”

- Fred Couples

Mark O’Meara

Tom Lehman

“Before 1980, I wasn’t terribly excited about the idea of a separate tour made up of older players. In part, that was because some of us disliked the idea of abandoning the regular PGA TOUR, with the glamor, riches and drama we’d helped to create.

“There was a reluctance to accept the verdict of time, that we simply couldn’t hit the ball quite as far and compete

I managed to fend off an attack of nerves and won the 1980 PGA Seniors Championship

To those sponsors, not to mention the fans, it was clear that with so many great players approaching their 50th birthday over the forthcoming decade—men like Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino and Raymond Floyd— there was a potent production line in place to enable the senior tour to manufacture something substantial.

But for the time being, there was no question that Palmer was the new circuit’s first superstar, albeit playing a limited schedule due to his numerous business and coursedesign commitments. His next two Senior PGA Tour wins came during the summer of 1982, at Marlborough Country Club, Massachusetts, and Pinehurst Country Club in Denver, Colorado, the latter a mere five miles from Cherry Hills Country Club, the scene of his famous 1960 U.S. Open triumph.

The King’s involvement is remembered with particular fondness in Marlborough after an inauspicious launch in 1981. “The second year [of the Marlboro Classic], Arnold Palmer played and we were swamped with requests for

with the same gusto as the flat-bellies. But by the end of the Seventies, the truth is I was pretty unhappy with the state of my game. So the senior tour came along at the perfect moment for me as I needed a new challenge and something big to play for.

“I felt I still had some unfinished business on the regular tour, namely the PGA Championship [the one Major he never won], but a couple of things happened to change my thinking. First off, considering all the things the PGA and PGA TOUR had done for me over the years I felt morally obliged to help out.

“Then, as if scripted by the golf gods themselves, I managed to fend off an attack of the nerves and win the 1980 PGA Seniors’ Championship [beating Paul Harney at the first hole of a sudden-death playoff]. I suppose it was the PGA Championship I never won.”

This ground-breaking victory at Turnberry Isle Resort in Florida might have been a case of déjà vu for Harney, whose only previous defeat in a playoff had come 17 years earlier in the 1963 Thunderbird Classic at Westchester Country Club, New York, when Palmer also got the better The Big Three at the 59th Senior PGA Championship of him; but for all their other contemporaries it was the start of a glorious journey into uncharted territory.

“The excitement and sudden interest that win created press credentials,” said tournament organizer Bob Kane. across the business world, I suppose, proved incalculable,” “Arnie won the tournament and when he came back the was Palmer’s assessment. following spring to participate in the press day outing, we Oddly, Palmer had not been able to play in the were deluged by everybody, from executives at the television inaugural U.S. Senior Open at Winged Foot earlier that stations to small newspapers and radio stations from all year because the USGA had set the age restriction to only around New England. allow those who were 55-years-old and older. For the 1981 “After Palmer won the tourney in 1982, Marlborough championship at Oakland Hills, though, that limit was Country Club was also inundated with membership sensibly lowered to 50 and Palmer went on to claim the applications and requests to hold corporate outings and title, beating his old rival Billy Casper, who had turned 50 tournaments. In those early years of the [Senior PGA] Tour, less than three weeks earlier, and journeyman Bob Stone in the players were very appreciative and many of them made an 18-hole playoff. lots of friends in Marlborough.”

“I’m told that victory was just the shot in the arm In total, Palmer won 10 Senior PGA Tour titles, half the Senior PGA Tour needed to really get rolling,” Palmer of which are now regarded as age-group Majors. His second reports. “After that, the sponsors started coming forward.”

PGA Seniors Championship—in 1984 at PGA National

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Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens, just north of Miami, by two shots from January—was a classic.

After a stunning second-round 63 that blew the field away, he generously sucked everyone back into the picture with an error-strewn 79 before a closing 71 steadied the ship down the stretch.

His final two “Major” wins were in the Senior Players Championships of 1984 and 1985, both staged at Canterbury Golf Club in Beachwood, Ohio. In 1984, he weathered a typically roller-coaster ride to see off Thomson by three shots, but 12 months later he was absolutely majestic, leading from start to finish and lapping the field by a mind-boggling 11 shots.

By the time he claimed his tenth and final Senior PGA Tour win—at the 1988 Crestar Classic in Virginia, a few days after his 59th birthday—Palmer had put down a formidable marker for all the apostles who followed him into the ranks of golf’s elder statesmen.

True, January (22) and Miller Barber (24) ended up with far more victories, and even Thomson (11) outstripped him in that regard, but his title tally came from just 100 appearances over nine years. From 1990-2006, Palmer played a further 218 times on the Senior PGA Tour (it changed its name to the Champions Tour in 2002), but his best performances were four third-place finishes in 1991 and another two years later.

But statistics only tell a fraction of the Palmer story when it comes to Tour events. His overall Senior PGA/

1982 Senior PGA Championship

Champions Tour winnings amounted to $1,765,795, just under $100,000 less than his total winnings on the regular TOUR—a career that spanned 734 appearances and delivered 62 victories, including seven Majors. Thus, in the regular TOUR lifetime money list he languishes in 397th place while in the senior equivalent he is 172nd.

For the man who opened the floodgates and made it all happen on both Tours, this would seem a modest return for a lifetime of trail-blazing, let alone intense, sustained competitiveness at the game’s cutting-most edge. Suffice to say, he has probably—and most deservedly—made up for the shortfall in other ways.

Arnold Palmer’s Senior PGA Tour wins (10) DATE December 4-7, 1980 July 9-12, 1981 June 10-13, 1982 August 12-15, 1982 December 1-4, 1983 January 19-22, 1984 June 21-24, 1984 November 30-December 2, 1984 June 20-23, 1985 September 16-18, 1988 Playoff defeat: April 6-8, 1984 *Senior majors are shown in bold

TOURNAMENT

VENUE

SCORES

VICTORY MARGIN

PGA Seniors Championship U.S. Senior Open Marlboro Classic Denver Post Champions of Golf Boca Grove Seniors Classic General Foods PGA Seniors Championship Senior Players Championship Quadel Seniors Classic Senior Players Championship Crestar Classic

Turnberry Isle Resort, North Miami Beach, FL Oakland Hills CC, Birmingham, MI Marlborough CC, Marlborough, MA Pinehurst CC, Denver, CO Boca Grove Plantation, Boca Raton, FL PGA National GC, Palm Beach Gardens, FL Canterbury GC, Beachwood, OH Boca Grove Plantation, Boca Raton, FL Canterbury GC, Beachwood, OH Hermitage CC, Manakin-Sabot, VA

72-69-73-75=289 (+1) 72-76-68-73=289 (+9) 68-70-69-69=276 (-8) 68-67-73-67=275 (-5) 65-69-70-67=271 (-17) 69-63-79-71=282 (-6) 72-68-67-69=276 (-12) 67-71-67=205 (-11) 67-71-68-68=274 (-14) 65-68-70=203 (-13)

Playoff Playoff 4 strokes 1 stroke 3 strokes 2 strokes 3 strokes 1 stroke 11 strokes 4 strokes

Daytona Beach Seniors Golf Classic

Club at Pelican Bay, Daytona Beach, FL

71-68-74=213 (-3)

Lost to Orville Moody on 2nd extra hole

Memorial Park, Houston, TX Purpoodock Club, Cape Elizabeth, ME Wailea GC, Maui, HI Wailea GC, Maui, HI Wailea GC, Maui, HI

66-68=134 (-10) Tied first with Miller Barber 65-67-68=200 (-13) 3 strokes 8 skins to beat Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino and Gary Player 7 skins to beat Chi Chi Rodriguez, Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino 5 skins to beat Chi Chi Rodriguez, Raymond Floyd and Jack Nicklaus

PALMER’S OTHER SENIOR WINS (5) May 18-19, 1984 September 26-28, 1986 January 27-28, 1990 January 25-26, 1992 January 30-31, 1993

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Aviator Shades

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The aviator style originated with Bausch & Lomb, now sold as Ray Ban, and it’s timeless. Today’s shades use the finest materials and glass, and Ray Ban opens up a world of stylish possibilities with an online customizer that will see you living la vie en rose, or any other color you like.

This Sterling Silver walking stick from impeccable Danish marque Georg Jensen is just one example of the house’s fine work. Today a source for jewelry, homewares and accessories, it has roadworthy items for discerning travelers as well.

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Dunhill Bag

Racing Accessory

A road tripper’s friend if there ever was one, the automotively named Chassis holdall in carbon fibre-printed cowhide has vegetable tanned leather trims and gunmetal finish hardware.

There’s also plenty of room for a weekend away, even if that weekend lasts a lifetime.

An obvious homage to the steering wheel, these stainless steel Racing cufflinks will leave no doubt as to the subject of your interest. If they needed any more distinction than a motorsports association, the Chopard logo is engaved on the back.

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Schott Jacket Marlon Brando, Bruce Springsteen, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Blondie and Joan Jett all knew it, now you know it too: The Schott Perfecto Motorcycle Jacket is the ultimate accessory and fashion statement.

More than that, it’s the original.

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StylMartin Boots Not just ruggedly elegant footwear, StylMartin’s Legend boots are functional footwear, great for motorcycling or just for walking around with a little extra kick in your step. And if you wear them enough, the Italian beauties will reward you with a beautiful patina. Attitude included free with every purchase.

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Race Time Timing has been an important part of racing since the first green flag waved, making it no wonder that so many top watchmakers have honored motorsports. In addition to the excellent Rolex Daytona (p123), here are a few of our favorite ways to time a lap

1. Tag Heuer 1963 Carrera 2. Parmigiani Bugatti RĂŠvĂŠlation 370 3. Breitling Bentley Mulliner Tourbillon 4. Jaeger Le Coultre AMVOX Aston Martin Transpondeur 5. Graham Silverstone RS Racing 6. Tissot PRS 516 7. Hublot Big Bang Ferrari Mexico

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Play it Safe Golf can be a pain sometimes— but it shouldn’t cause pain, exactly.

The experts at Cleveland Clinic want you and your game to work in harmony…

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olf can hurt—and we’re talking about more than egos, which are universally bruised by the game. According to the experts at Cleveland Clinic, more than half of all golfers will experience a golf-related injury at some point, and these are beyond the non-golf-related injuries that can be exacerbated by the game (i.e., people aggravating an existing problem by playing golf when they should be resting). Most golf-related injuries are due to the game’s repetitious nature and the extent that muscles and joints are employed during the swing—and this is where we come to the good part, because the chance of injuring yourself can be greatly lessened by adjusting your swing and by better conditioning your body. Maybe you have a bad swing, one that’s fundamentally flawed and which puts unnecessary pressure on your muscles and joints. Maybe your swing has always been great but your body is changing and so it’s time to adjust your game as well. Maybe you don’t warm up properly, don’t properly prepare your muscles and joints for the stress of golf. Maybe it’s something else. Cleveland Clinic offers a Golf Smart program that evaluates and addresses (and rehabilitates, if necessary) health issues that have been noticed in relation to the game. It’s something worth noting because the hospital is one of the country’s best, and so if the team there has taken the time to design a golf-specific program, this is a real issue—and it’s primarily an issue for amateurs.

Need evidence? One study in the late 1990s compared injury patterns between LPGA players and amateur female golfers. The most frequently reported injury sites in the LGPA players were the left wrist (over 30%), the low back (over 20%) and the left hand (approximately 10%). The amateurs reported a slightly different pattern of injury involving the elbow (over 35%), the low back (almost 30%) and the shoulder (over 15%). Overuse appeared to account for the vast majority of the injuries in both populations while poor swing mechanics were implicated in only the amateurs. Both groups reported injuries from hitting the ground (taking a divot) and twisting during a swing, though both were more common in the amateur golfers.

For anyone who has swung a club himself and then carefully watched a professional execute the same task, it is probably not surprising at all that injuries may be very different depending upon the experience and skill of the golfer.

What is common across the sport is the fact that the biomechanics of the swing truly affect multiple areas of the body and in a notably asymmetric way. This is important to consider when conditioning for golf as one should aim for increased strength and flexibility in the areas generating movement and power through the swinging motion but also to “undo” the asymmetry by balancing out joints and muscles moving in the opposite manner.

Consult your health care provider if you feel your swing is impacting your health, and it’s a good idea to consult with him or her about developing a wellness plan to improve your general conditioning and flexibility for the game as well. But also have a conversation with your golf pro and talk about how you might make your swing more fluid and less impactful on your muscles and joints.

With more than half of us facing a golf-related injury at some point, it makes sense to be proactive about getting your body in shape for the game—and about getting your game in shape for your body.

For more information, visit clevelandclinic.org

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Singing in the rain

It’s winter, and at this time of year, not everyone can live in Southern California or Dubai, so we headed to a European Tour venue in the UK, London Golf Club, where director of golf Paul Stuart offered some tips on how to keep scores low when the water level is high

Paul Stuart Paul Stuart is a one-club man. He joined London Golf Club just after it opened in 1994 as a caddie, just looking for some summer work, and 21 years later he is director of golf, a position he has held for five years. An England international as an amateur who partnered with Luke Donald, Stuart oversees 36 holes of championship golf at London Golf Club in north Kent, just outside southeast London. London Golf Club is a member of the European Tour Properties stable, and the club has served as venue for the European Open and most recently for the 2014 Volvo World Match Play Championship.

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C h i p p i n g

Club selection: In firm conditions, you might opt for a sand wedge for chipping, with a lot of loft to help generate some backspin, but in wet conditions you don’t need backspin so a pitching wedge or 9-iron might work better. By opting for less loft you will bring more power to the shot to help run the ball up to the pin over wet and slow turf.

Forward of Center

Setup: When the ground is firm you can chip with the ball in the middle or towards the back of your stance, but in wet conditions position the ball just forward of center in your stance.

Shallow swing: In the summer you might use a wristy, steep backswing to come down hard on the back of the ball, but in winter keep the wrists more static, with less hinge, and employ a shallower takeaway. This will encourage a lower, more penetrating ball flight to reach the pin in slower conditions.

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Club selection: When the rough is damp, striking the ball as cleanly as possible is the priority. Any grass or water between the clubface and the ball is going to soften impact and reduce ball speed and shot distance.

When playing a full iron shot, play up one club to give your shot more power through a thick lie.

O f T h e R o u g h

Setup: Move the ball back in your stance slightly and choke down to the bottom of the grip, to encourage a steeper swing.

Steep swing: As opposed to the shallow chipping technique (on previous page), here you want to hinge the wrists for a steep backswing, and then come down hard on the back of the ball. This will minimize interference from the wet grass between the clubface and the ball to promote that clean strike.

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B u n k e r S h o t s

Club selection: A typical sand iron offers more bounce than a lob wedge, and in wet and heavy sand there is a risk the bounce of the sand iron will skid over the sand so the club’s leading edge strikes the ball halfway up. This thin connection might leave the ball in the bunker or even over the green altogether. It’s a lottery either way. For wet sand, opt for a lob wedge and less bounce to reduce the chance of hitting the ball thin.

Take less sand: Take a regular setup and concentrate on striking the sand no more than an inch before the ball, as opposed to an inch and a half in dry conditions. Apart from that, concentrate on your normal swing and make sure you follow through.

A lob wedge (pictured here on the left) offers less bounce than a traditional sand iron (pictured on the right) Aim to strike the sand an inch behind the ball (bottom left) and remember to follow through (below)

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Three days in May In May 2016 it will be 40 years since Arnold Palmer was part of a four-man team that set a world record for circumnavigating the globe in a passenger jet On May 17, 1976, Arnold Palmer took off from Denver’s Stapleton International Airport at 10:24am and headed to Boston. He was flying a specially adapted Lear 36 jet with two other pilots, Jim Bir and Bill Purkey, along with journalist Bob Sterling, and they were setting out to break the speed record for circumnavigation of the globe in a passenger jet.

From Boston the next stop was Paris, then Tehran, Sri Lanka, Jakarta, Manila in the Philippines, to Wake Island in the Pacific Ocean, to Honolulu and then back to Denver. Despite never spending more than an hour on the ground at each stop Palmer enjoyed high tea with the Crown Prince of Iran and rode an elephant in Sri Lanka, before the plane was chased out of Manila by a fastapproaching typhoon.

Ultimately, the Lear jet returned safely to Denver at 7:49pm on May 19, after a journey of 57 hours, 25 minutes and 42 seconds. The previous record— which had stood for a decade—was eclipsed by nearly 30 hours.

Palmer maintains to this day that his journey around the globe in May 1976 was his “biggest thrill” in 50 years of flying.

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Arnold Palmer prepares for his record-breaking circumnavigation of the globe nearly 40 years ago

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